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Jerusalem: The Primitive Christian Vision Of William Blake

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Jerusalem: The Primitive Christian Vision Of William Blake

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Content F I J 70-19,126 ! j UNRUH, Donald John, 1939- i JERUSALEM: THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN VISION | OF WILLIAM BLAKE. f I University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1970 j Language and Literature, modern i i l i j [ University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © Copyright by DONALD JOHN UNRUH 1970 THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED JERUSALEM: THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN VISION OP WILLIAM BLAKE by Donald John Unruh A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) January 1970 U N IVE R S ITY O F S O U TH E R N C A L IF O R N IA T H E G RADUATE SC H O O L U N IV E R S IT Y PARK LOS A NG ELES. C A LIF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by ........... RQaa±dJQhn..Un?.iih............ under the direction of his..... Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Gradu ate School, in partial fulfillm ent of require ments fo r the degree of D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y Q&mJLDM ' 7 r i a f d ° \Jf Dean rw , J a n u a ry , 1 9 7 0 ________ ACKNOWLEDGMENT In Gratitude . . . Jesus said: "Wouldest thou love one who never died "For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? "And if God dieth not for Man and giveth not himself "Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love "As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death "In the Divine image, nor can Man exist but by Brother hood. " {Jerusalem 96:23-28) Blake tells us that work (truly creative work, that is) and life are inseparable, and that the necessary condition for each is "Brotherhood." For the fraternal community, at once, both defines and liberates the individual and his ef forts. Jesus says, "I will give you the keys of the king dom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matthew 16:19). In such a binding and loosing community and when such work is happening, Jesus is present. Inasmuch as this study reflects such work, it is the product of such a community. So, it is only right that I express my gratitude. I owe this debt to two separate communities, which in the preparation of this study became one. First, I am grateful to the community of scholars whose work was indispensable to my own, and whose help I ii have acknowledged wherever I was conscious of it, but espe cially to one. Professor Max F. Schulz, my teacher and friend, who started me on my way and guided me to the end. In him I met one who was critical without self interest and who encouraged without condescension. Second, I am grateful for my wife, Margaret, and our children, Miriam and Mark, who have joyfully given themselves to make the home a place of life and work. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENT ...................................... ii INTRODUCTION ........................................ I Chapter I. CHRISTIAN ANTIESTABLISHMENTARIANISM .... 21 Primitive Christianity against the Official Church Priesthood and Kingship Prophet against Priest II. THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE KINGDOM OF THIS W O R L D ..................... 113 The Bible as Redemptive History The Israelites and the English: A Chosen People The Covenant with Israel and the Covenant with Albion The Covenant of Priam The Covenant of Jehovah The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this World III. MAN, CHRIST AND REDEMPTION................. 185 The Conflict: Epistemology or Ontology Man and the Fall Jesus and Redemption Albion Redeemed APPENDIXES......................... 261 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................ 287 INTRODUCTION 1 have undertaken this study of Jerusalem partly be cause Jerusalem wants study. Of all Blake's works, and par ticularly of his major works, it has received least atten tion. Certainly, in the light of the quality of its poetry and the importance of its thought, both for the study of Blake's other works and for the whole tradition of English Letters, it has received too little attention. The most obvious reason for this neglect is Jerusalem* s obscurity. S. Foster Damon, the first in a long line of great Blake critics, is forthright in his assertion of this fact. "Jerusalem,1 1 he says, "is the last and obscurest of Blake's „ 1 epics." Jerusalem is obscure for several reasons. For one, it lacks a discernible linear plot, although it seems to prom ise one. If there is a plot, as Damon says, it "is at once 2 broad and vague." ^William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (New York, 1924), p. 195. 2 Damon, p. 185. Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of passing through Eternal Death I and of the awakening to Eternal Life. (Jerusalem 4:1-2) Echoing the opening of the Aeneid, the poem admittedly be gins with Albion's fall and ends with his redemption, but beyond that it has so far defied attempts to discover a clear sequence of actions (either logically or chronologi cally ordered) which might lead Albion from fall to redemp- 3 tion. As for subplot, "there is nothing remotely resem- 4 bling what could be called a subplot." Secondly, failing to find plot, most of Jerusalem1s critics have sought for a poetic, mythic or psychological structure— for some element of pattern which might allow the reader to discern the shape and coherence of the work and which might allow him to make a coherent statement about it. David V. Erdman seems to have abandoned even this hope and has been content to focus on those passages in Jerusalem 3 "It is perfectly evident . . . that Blake had not de veloped his narrative powers. There are many incoherences, and even some contradictions. For example, Albion utters twice his last words in Eternity (23:26 and 47:17). The surmise is that Blake did not conceive the fall as one steady act, but as a spiral alternating upward and downward; some times gleaming with the old light, sometimes passing a point already passed before. We cannot accuse Blake of careless ness, knowing his habit for elaborate revision; especially when we remember the many years he spent on Jerusalem. He undoubtedly preferred accurate psychology to an over-simpli fied map of the Mystic Way." Damon, p. 193. 4 Damon, p. 185. 5 which lend themselves to his historical-political approach. As for the rest— those who have wished for more— they have 6 derived or devised a range of structures all of which are the product of focusing on certain elements in the poem and ignoring others; consequently, they all tend to distort the poem, and some seem to have little or nothing to do with the poem at all. For the moment even the hope of finding a con sistent, logical structure for Jerusalem seems unwarranted. Finally, the characters themselves stand in the way of 7 comprehension. The problem of deducing the meaning of Blake's characters is familiar to anyone who has read him. But Jerusalem has special problems. The poem contains a plethora of characters all of which should be familiar to us from our reading of Blake's other works or from our reading of the Bible or English literature and history. But charac ters and place names which were familiar suddenly become 5 Blake; Prophet against Empire (Princeton, 1954), pp. 422-449. ®Cf. Appendix I. 7 "Almost all the characters which Blake ever invented live in the subliminal consciousness of this poem [i.e. Jerusalem). Time and again the depths are stirred and a gush of half-forgotten names emerge for the moment, to be lost immediately in the impenetrable black. All Blake's technical terms are used to their fullest possible extent, as a sort of convenient shorthand to note an idea rapidly before it vanishes. To add to the difficulty, biblical characters appear and disappear momentarily with the most unfamiliar gestures. Vainly we try to discover some sequence, some reason, in their actions; and not until we guess their significance as symbols do their apparitions take on meaning." Damon, p.185 strange and unintelligible in Jerusalem. Albion, Jesus, Jerusalem, Vala, Los, Rahab all seem to take on new meanings and values. Then there is the added problem that one char acter sometimes stands for more than one idea and that one idea is often represented by more than one character. But apart from the obscurity of Jerusalem there is something in the quality of its verse and thought that seems to dissuade devoted readers. Here, Jerusalem contrasts with The Four Zoas, which has the ability to engage the reader more quickly. In part, the power of The Four Zoas to engage lies in the fact that it seems to reach higher both in com- g position and conception than Jerusalem. It contains some of Blake's greatest and most beautiful poetry. The struc ture of The Four Zoas seems also to be at once more ambi tious and more discernible. All of this generates a kind of fascination which encourages persistence. And at the same time, because the unfinished state in which Blake left the poem admits that he was not able to carry it off, the reader is satisfied with less. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is more sober, more controlled. It creates the impression that the poet had a clear and sober conception of his direction and that he got there. So, the reader is at once more g At first sight, Jerusalem contains less poetry than any of Blake's other works. . . . there is nothing resem bling the lyrical quality found so often in The Four Zoas and at times in Milton. Jerusalem is pitched in a key at once darker and more sublime." Damon, p. 194. anxious to know the way and more baffled and disheartened at not finding it. Jerusalem also gives the impression that it goes deeper, that it accomplishes more than The Four Zoas, and the reader is more covetous of its secret. The Four Zoas has always had, it seems to me, more promoters than Jerusalem. Jerusalem needs to be read. It needs critics. Al though the time may come when enough is known about the poem so that a clear and consistent structure may emerge, for the moment we must be satisfied, like Erdman, to elucidate as many of its elements as we can. And in the light of Blake's insistence on the importance of "infinite particulars" we should not expect to do less. Consequently, this study seeks to explain only certain elements in Jerusalem. How ever , in order to guard against the study' s breaking up into a series of explications of isolated passages, I have chosen three criteria to give it unity and coherence. In the first place, I wish to demonstrate that the Jerusalem vision is a Christian vision. In the second place, I wish to show that Blake's vision in Jerusalem has been strongly influenced by, even largely dependent upon, his reading of the Bible. And I wish to accomplish these two objectives by showing the strong resemblance of Blake's Jerusalem vision to what has been called "primitive Christianity." Although my three criteria are all different, and although they are not always equally present in the study, they are, as I shall show, essentially related. Perhaps my most immediate task is to provide a defini tion of "primitive Christianity." One of the great diffi culties in dealing with any movement, whether political, literary, philosophical or theological is to find an accur ate designation for it. This is particularly true of move ments that are new or just beginning to be realized. All labels, however ingenious, contain ambiguities that tend to distort the movements for which they stand by emphasizing one or another of their characteristics. Even such long standing labels as Medieval, Renaissance, Classical or Romantic have been the subjects of endless debate and have frustrated the best efforts of savants to give them concise and formal definitions. They have, however, over a long period of time collected a certain body of ideas and associ ations, very few of which have anything to do with the ori ginal lexical meaning of the label. Names for new movements, or for movements which are just making themselves known to us, do not have this advantage. Most of them carry such a weight of irrelevant meanings and associations as to make them ultimately cumbersome and useless. But the mind continually grasps for such designations. So, it will be convenient in this study, where it would seem that the task of defining and exploring a Christian tradi tion is to be put in the service of helping us understand 7 Blake's Jerusalem vision, to choose a name for that tradi tion. The fact that the tradition of which I speak has just recently begun to force itself upon our consciousness makes the choice more difficult and a trifle arbitrary. This movement finds its most obvious and visible expression in Q what Roland H. Bainton calls the "Left Wing of the Reforma tion." Thomas J. J. Altizer^0 calls it "Radical Christian ity." This label could serve nicely because it clearly sug gests the stance of this movement to the main stream of Protestant and Catholic Christianity. However, its attrac tiveness is also its limitation. The label "radical Chris tianity" is for my study too heavily slanted in the direc tion of the post-Reformation radical groups of Europe. It tends to limit the movement to a particular historical per iod and to deny me the freedom of demonstrating the central thrust of a movement which was only secondarily a reaction 11 to main stream or official Christianity. Hans Rudr Weber has used the term "prophetic Christianity" when speaking of this movement, and although it does not impose the limita tion of the previous label, the word "prophetic" has so many associations for students of Blake, that I feel the need for ^The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Boston, 1952), pp. 95-109 and 123, 140. 10The Hew Apocalypse: The Radical Christianity of William Blake (East Lansing, Michigan, 1967), p. xv. "^"Laity in the Apostolic Church," Ecumenical Review, X (April 1958), 286-293. a term that will allow me to set off the movement from Blake more definitely in order to show a clearer relationship. In the end, I have decided to adopt the label "primitive Chris tianity," which I take from Franklin H. Littell's study, The 12 Oricrins of Sectarian Protestantism. The advantage of this choice will soon be apparent. When Littell uses the term "primitive Christianity" or "religious primitivism" he is referring primarily to the whole Left Wing of the sixteenth century Reformation in gen eral, and to the Anabaptists in particular. Although he is primarily interested in finding the origins of modern sec tarian Protestantism in the Left Wing of the Reformation, and although he has most to say about the origins of Anabap- tism, he makes it abundantly clear that he considers "reli gious primitivism" to be a notion common to all the groups 13 in the Left Wing, and clearly suggests that the notion is not limited to the Reformation, but begins at the time of the Constantine Settlement in 312 A.D. and continues. down to 14 the present. It is during the Reformation, however, that (New York, 1964), p. xvi. 13 "When we review the various sixteenth-century groups which broke from the pattern of established religion, we are struck by the degree to which all shared an attitude to his tory which is technically known as 'primitivism.1 1 1 Littell, p. xvi. ^When Ernst Benz traces the history of the "true Church" through all of the reform and dissenting movements in Church history, he is suggesting that the "true Church" has always been opposed to the established church. "The "primitive Christianity" made its most dramatic appearance, and it is in the Left Wing of the Reformation that we first become clearly aware of what it is and how it manifested itself. Essentially "primitive Christianity" is the belief that during apostolic times the Church existed in a state of primal innocence, that with the Constantine Settlement it fell, that in the present it is capable of being at least partially restored, and that in the apocalyptic future it 15 will be finally reestablished. "Primitive Christianity" found lively support for this pattern of innocence, fall and restoration in the Bible— both in the spiritual history of mankind and in the spiritual history of Israel. It was not slow to point up the parallels between the human, Jewish and ecclesiastical patterns, and to derive support for their notions from these parallels. As we shall see, both the pattern and its parallels are very much alive in Jerusalem. This "religious primitivism" is, according to Littell, 16 "the thread which ties together" all the multifarious history of the church leads from the apostles through the martyrs, the hermits and monks of the Greek Church to the Benedictine monasticism of the Western Church; to the Canons Regular and to their effort to make the poor life of humil ity and submission binding upon all clergy; to the Cister cian reform; to the cluniac monasticism; and expressed it self conclusively in the Franciscan reform movement." Ecclesia Spiritualis (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1934), p. 310. Cf. also Littell, pp. 50-55. 15Littell, pp. 48, 56. 16Littell, p. 47. 10 groups which comprise the Left Wing of the Reformation, and it is this "religious primitivism" which clarifies the essential difference between "primitive Christianity" and main stream or magisterial Protestantism. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the English reformers had a very keen sense of the corrupted Church, but could not have conceived of it as fallen. Their main emphasis, consequently, fell on reforma tion. On the other hand, "primitive Christianity," because of its deep conviction that the Church had fallen, put its 17 emphasis on restitution. The "primitive Christian" groups, then, cannot properly be called Protestant at all. For al though they attacked the Church repeatedly in their writings, they did not do so with any motive of reforming the Church, but simply to lend credence to their assertion that the Church no longer had meaning, and to support their claim that it was necessary to return to the patterns of apostolic Chr ist ianity. This strong belief in the innocence of primitive (i.e. apostolic) Christianity and the need to return to it, led to a host of secondary notions. First, there was a new empha sis on the Word of God. If the Church as they knew it was fallen, then of course, its word could not be held as authoritative. At the same time, if it was necessary to 17 ". . . the reformers aimed to reform the old Church by the Bible? the radicals attempted to build a new Church from the Bible." R. J. Smithson, The Anabaptists (London, 1935), pp. 14-15. Cf. also Littell, p. 47. ............................. IX return to the patterns of the innocent church, then the Word of God must he held as alone authoritative. Although all of the groups which grew out of "primitive Christianity" held to the doctrine of the authority of the Word of God, they did not all agree as to what was meant by the Word of God. There was in fact a rather sharp division between those who claimed ultimate authority for the Written Word (i.e. the Bible) and those who claimed ultimate authority for the Liv ing Word (i.e. the resurrected Christ). Those who tended to claim authority for the Written Word held the Bible to be the divinely revealed Word of God, the absolute sure guide in all matters of faith and practice and the inspired ac count of the beginnings of the "true Church." The most con sistent expression of this point of view is to be found in 18 Anabaptism. In short, they held to the doctrine of sola scriptura and hotly denied the claims of the official churches for ecclesiastical authority. But paradoxically, the doctrine of sola scriptura tended to lead Anabaptism back in the direction of ecclesiasticism. The central pre occupation of Anabaptism was with the nature of the New 18 On the Anabaptist attitude to the Bible and its authority, cf. Gordon D. Kaufman, "Some Theological Emphasis of the Early Swiss Anabaptists, " Mennonite Quarterly Review, XXV (1951), 2:75-99. Wilhel Wiswedel, "The Inner and the Outer Word," Mennonite Quarterly Review, XXVI (1952), 3:171- 191. John c. Wenger, "The Biblicism of the Anabaptists," in The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hershberger (Scottdale, Pennsylvania, 1957), pp. 167-179. 19 Testament Church as revealed in the Bible. They were quite sure that it was not only possible to derive the structure of the "true Church" from the New Testament, but that it was imperative that they do so. In other words, they felt that the pattern of the "true Church" was abun dantly clear in the New Testament and that the task of the Christian was to be obedient to that pattern. This emphasis on the establishment of the Church, although after the pat tern of the true, New Testament Church, caused them to duplicate some of the errors of official Christianity. They began to tend towards establishmentarianism, and to build Christian communities which in a sense were folkskirchen, although with a different set of boundaries. The other half of the "primitive Christian" movement— those who claimed authority for the Living Word— moved in another direction. For them it was the resurrected Christ, present and active everywhere on earth in the person of the Holy Spirit, who was the final arbiter in faith and practice. For them, revelation had not come to an end with the closing of the New Testament canon, but was still available to any one who wished to avail himself of the guidance of the Spirit. This group has sometimes been called the Spiritual- IQ "... the central theological concern of the Anabap tists was in the church," Littell, p. xviii and Chapter III passim. Cf. also Cornelius Krahn, "Prolegomina to an Ana baptist Theology," Mennonite Quarterly Review, XXIV (1950), 1:5-11. ........ 13 isten. In contrast to the Anabaptists, the SpirituaXisten tended towards an individualist Christianity. The belief in the Living Word became a belief in the Inner Word, and "any one possessed of the spirit could proclaim with authority 20 the truths of the inner life." Their belief in the possi bility and validity of individual revelation led ultimately to a denial of the authority of the Bible on the one hand, and to enthusiasm and to a lively form of prophetism on the other. Also in contrast to the Anabaptists, this emphasis on the Inner Word led to a denial of the validity of the Church as we know it and finally to the "dissolution of any 21 visable church." There was in fact, among the Spiritual- isten, a strong antiestablishmentarianism. Sebastian Frank, the most eloquent exponent of the spiritualist doctrine, proclaims, "Only the free, nonsectarian, non-partisan On Littell, pp. 21-27. Cf. also on the Spiritualisten, Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York, 1931), II, p. 933ff. 21 Littell quotes a series of sixteenth century spirit ualists on this point. I give only two of them— the first from Ulrich Stadler, the second from Jacob Kautz. "The true inner word is one eternal and almighty power of God, identi cal in men and God, and accomplishes all things. . . . But what man preaches is only the sign or symbol of truth. The Eternal Word will not be read or preached; the solitary man will be assured of it in the abyss of the soul by God, and it will be inscribed on the human heart by God." "The word we verbalize/read/write is not the living/eternal Word of God/ but only a symbol and sign of the inner by which it makes outward appearance. No outward word or sign or Sacra ment/ also no outer office has the power/ for it strengthens and comforts the inner man." The antiestablishmentarian quality of the doctrine of the Inner Word is clear from these passages., p. 22. 14 Christianity . . . is from God, and its piety is not bound 22 to sect, time, station, law, person or party." Because of this antiestablishmentarianism, because they denied the necessity and validity of any kind of church structure, the Spiritualisten groups tended to dissipate and disappear rather rapidly. Secondly, both the Anabaptists and the Spiritualisten were firmly convinced that the Christian community, or the Kingdom of God, should be separated from the Kingdom of the World. For "primitive Christianity" the Kingdom of God was made up of all of the disciples of Jesus, the Kingdom of the World was comprised of all the unbelievers, whether they be longed to a church or not. "When the old institutional forms opposed and hindered the coming of the New Age [i.e. the reestablishment of Apostolic Christianity], then the old church was recognized as cast in the image of the Anti- Christ: its efforts to hinder the revival of apostolic 23 Christianity were proof of its diabolical character." It was because of the blurring or erasing of the boundaries be tween the two Kingdoms, between the Church and the World, at the time of the Constantine Settlement, because the Church had become coexistent and coterminous with the World that 22 Littell, p. 22. Sebastian Frank is repeatedly con sidered by Church Historians as the prototype of the indi vidual Christian, modern and without formal attachment. 23Littell, p. 53. 15 the Church had fallen.^ consequently, "primitive Chris tianity" held that an important part of its task in restor ing the Church was to reestablish the separation. Attendant upon the notion of the separation of the two Kingdoms was the notion of history as the great spiritual struggle be- 2 ^ tween the two with a final victory for the Kingdom of God.*3 Finally, because of its devotion to the restoration of the Church now, and because of its hope in the future and final victory for the Kingdom of God, there was a strong 2 6 eschatological emphasis to "primitive Christianity." Its eschatology took two forms. On the one hand, there was the hope in the final establishment of the Kingdom of God during the Apocalypse, when the World as we know it would pass away and a New Earth (i.e. the New Jerusalem) would come to pass. In fact, it was only at that time, under those conditions, that the two Kingdoms could be coterminous. On the other hand, there was an even stronger notion that the Kingdom of God begins now, in this present age, in anticipation of, and preparation for, the final victory of the Kingdom of God after the Last Judgment. This latter notion meant for "primitive Christianity" not only the building of the "true ^Littell, pp. 62, 66, 105. 25on the doctrine of the two worlds cf. Robert Friedman, "The Doctrine of the Two Worlds," in The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hershberger (Scottdale, Penn- sylvania, 1957), pp. 105-118. 26x,ittell, pp. 76, 126f. , 119, 132f. 16 Church" but also the building of the Kingdom Within. These two notions combined to produce a strong chiliastic prophet- ism in some groups and ended in such abuses as the Muenster Kingdom which was an attempt to realize the eschatalogical Kingdom now by establishing a community exclusively of be- 27 lievers patterned after Davidic Judaism. The struggle between "primitive Christianity" and magisterial Protestantism was primarily on the grounds enum erated above. The official churches first of all strongly denied the notion that the Church had fallen. Secondly, al though all of the Protestant churches put great store on the validity and importance of the Bible, they could not com pletely divest themselves of the insistence on ecclesiasti cal authority, and were completely unwilling to entertain the notion of individual revelation. Thirdly, because of their relationship to, and dependence on, the magisterial powers, they could not accept the "primitive Christian" no tion of the separation of the Church and the World. Finally, their notion of the Kingdom of God was almost completely futuristic. In fact, Luther repeatedly defended the concep tion of the folks- or landeskirche on the grounds that at the Last Judgment Christ would separate the "sheep" from the "goats" and purge the Church of its impurities. "Primitive Christianity" maintained that the Last Judgment was now as ^Littell, pp. 29-39, and Bainton, pp. 105-106. 17 well as future, and that the separation was now as well as future.28 It must be pointed out, however, that in part the con flict between "primitive Christianity" and official Protes tantism existed within Lutheran doctrine itself. On the one hand, it was Luther who so clearly enunciated the doctrine of sola fiedes— faith alone. It was not faith in faith, but faith in the living Christ, that Luther was proclaiming with that doctrine. And to proclaim such a faith is to move strangely close to the point of view of the Spiritualisten. On the other hand, the doctrine of sola scriptura is also Luther's. The belief in the authority of the scriptures, however, is quickly followed by the notion that there is a right and a wrong interpretation of scripture. And to ac cept the notion that there is an authoritative interpreta tion of scripture is to move dangerously close to the notion of ecclesiastical authority and establishmentarianism. To deny it is to move back towards the notion of the validity of individual revelation and spiritualism. Although Luther finally moved in the direction of establishmentarianism, he never denied the importance of faith in Christ, and this accounts for both the curious kind of schizophrenia and for the wide range of modern Lutheranism. Probably the most striking example of the effect of this conflict is to be 28Littell, pp. 1-32. " "" 18 found in Hegel1s dialectical system which was worked out 29 while he was a student at a German Lutheran seminary. It should by now he apparent how much Blake1s Jerusalem vision has in common with primitive Christianity. (I have, I think, defined the movement carefully enough to remove the quotations.) First, there is in Jerusalem much evidence of religious primitivism with its lively notion of innocence, fall and restoration. Second, there is a clear conception of the Bible as the inspired word of God. Third, there is a whole hearted faith in the Living Word— the resurrected Jesus. Fourth, a clear sighted view of the gulf between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the World. Fifth, an emphasis on the establishment of the Kingdom Within now. Each of these will receive extended treatment in the follow ing chapters. A great deal has been written about Blake’s Christian ity. There are those who deny it and those who assert it. In part I take objection with both parties. For although this study is founded on the notion that the Jerusalem vision is profoundly Christian, this assertion can only be substantiated, I feel, on the grounds that Blake's 29 It is interesting and significant to notice that the study of Blake by Thomas J. J. Altizer cited above is based on a comparison between Blake's system of thought and the dialectical system of Hegel. Unfortunately Altizer also falls prey to the Lutheran notion that true Christianity is official Christianity. 19 Christianity follows the tenants of primitive Christianity rather than those of official Christianity. The notion that Blake is pervasively antiestablishmen- tarian is not novel. Almost any book or article on Blake will tell us as much. It is impossible to read any part of Blake's works without confronting that notion. But what has not always been understood as clearly is the fact that there is a strong antiestablishmentarian strain in Christianity— and particularly in primitive Christianity. Neither has it been clearly understood that Blake's antiestablishmentarian- ism in Jerusalem follows the pattern of primitive Christian antiestablishmentarianism. The first chapter in this study makes this point. Much of what I have to say in that chap ter cannot be new. The pattern of Blake's antiestablishmen tarianism has long been evident. If at times I weary the reader by retracing that pattern, it is to demonstrate that it is also a Christian one. The intention of the first chapter is frankly polemical. And if at times I appear to be adopting Blake's polemics, it must be forgiven on the grounds that Blake is supremely persuasive. It is impos sible to read Blake for any length of time without under going an adjustment of perception. More than any other English poet, he has the power to alter vision. In the second chapter I demonstrate that the idea which lies at the center of Jerusalem— the notion of the New Jerusalem or the establishment of the Kingdom of God— 20 follows with remarkable precision the primitive Christian view of these events. It is also in this chapter that I demonstrate the importance of the primitive Christian "king dom theology" to the understanding of Jerusalem, and attempt to suggest how Blake read the Bible— the patterns he saw in it and where he put his emphasis. If the first chapter removes the most common objection to Blake's Christianity, the last chapter removes the most serious objection. This chapter is in some ways the heart of the study. Here I deal with the three central Christian doctrines— anthropology, soteriology and Christology. Un less it can be shown that for Blake, in Jerusalem, the fall and redemption of man is in some way ontological, and that Christ is in some way transcendent— that is, unless the Jerusalem vision can be shown to be in essential agreement with Christianity on these three points— the claim for Blake's Christianity must fail. CHAPTER I CHRISTIAN ANTIESTABLISHMENTARIANISM Primitive Christianity against the Official Church It is wrong to assume that Blake's attack on the Chris tian establishment implies a rejection of Christianity. That he considered himself a Christian seems beyond doubt, and that there are many similarities between his system and Christianity is equally clear. In his annotations to Watson's An Apolocrv for the Bible, Blake proclaims, To me, who believe the Bible & profess myself a Chris tian, a defence of the Wickedness of .the Israelites in murdering so many thousands under pretence of a command from God is altogether Abominable & Blasphemous.1 (K. 387) 1 All quotations from Blake are taken from The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1966). The pagination in this edition is essentially the same as in the single volume, 1957, Nonesuch Press edition. I have chosen this edition because of its availability, and because it has become something of a standard edition in Blake scholarship. Whenever it is desirable to be more faithful to Blake's own spelling and punctuation, I have quoted from The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, New York, 1965), which has the ad vantage of being more faithful to Blake1s sometimes erratic habits of spelling and punctuation. At such times I dually record my source. Whenever quoting from Blake's poetry, I have generally included the citation in the text, locating the passage by plate and line number so that it might easily be found in any edition. For many prose passages and when ever it is more convenient, I have cited page numbers in Keynes as follows: (K. 385). 21 22 It is this kind of statement that causes so much unrest among Blake scholars. There is, on one hand, the open and forthright assertion of belief, and on the other, a point of view which seems to deny that belief. A much more tradi tional if less direct statement of the same belief appears in the prose preface, in Chapter One of Jerusalem, entitled "To the Public" : — The Enthusiasm of the following Poem, the Author hopes no Reader will think presumptuousness or arrogance when he is reminded that the Ancients entrusted their love to their Writing, to the full as Enthusiastically as I have who Acknowledge mine for my Savior and Lord? for they were wholly absorb'd in their Gods. I also hope the Reader will be with me, wholly One in Jesus our Lord, who is the God of Fire and the Lord of Love to whom the An cients look'd and saw his day afar off, with trembling & amazement. The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sins: he who waits to be righteous before he enters the Sav iour's kingdom, the Divine Body, will never enter there. I am perhaps the most sinful of men. I pretend not to holiness: yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily as man with man, & the more to have an inter est in the Friend of Sinners.^ (Jerusalem, plate 3) In spite of many such traditional statements, Blake scholar ship has frequently assumed that Blake rejected Christianity. It is equally wrong, and even more untenable, to assume that Blake's profession of belief implies an acceptance of the Christian establishment. The attempt to somehow recon- 2 Keynes makes the following notation about this pas^ sage: "All the words on the plates here printed in italics have been partially erased from the copper, sometimes with others which cannot be recovered" (K. 620). Unless other wise noted, all subsequent italics in quotations from Blake will be for the same reason. cile Blake's rejection of the established forms of religion with his profession of Christianity is abundantly clear in this passage from J. D. Davies' book, The Theolocry of William Blake. Davies says: Nevertheless, despite his vigorous denunciation of all that was evil in the Church of his day, "Blake escaped the wholesale condemnation of Christianity to which Paine and Shelley succumbed. Instead it is one of the greatest proofs of his intellectual clarity that Blake could distinguish so definitely between the Churches and the religion of Christ," because he saw that all forms of organized religion, however impregnated with error, still preserve a portion of truth, and he was not one of those illogical persons who immediately condemn a doc trine because he who teaches it does not practice what he preaches.^ It is immediately evident from the last part of the passage (especially in the clause "he was not one of those illogical persons") that Davies is writing an apologetic for the Church rather than a dispassionate interpretation of Blake. Davies has poisoned the well and hopes no one will dare to place Blake in it. It is quite easy to see where he has gone wrong. He has tried to exonerate the church by miti gating Blake's hatred of it. That part of the passage which is in quotation marks (from "'Blake escaped'" to "'the reli gion of Christ’") is a quotation taken from Allardyce 4 Nicoll's William Blake and His Poetry. The quote by itself, even as it stands out of its own context, is quite accurate. Blake did not reject Christianity in spite of the fact that he rejected the Church. Mr. Davies has misunderstood the ^(Oxford, 1948), p. 21. ^(London, 1922), p. 63. i 24 meaning, however, and has used it to support his contention that Blake accepted the Church even though he rejected its 5 abuses. In the end, Mr. Davies cannot find it possible that someone who professes a belief in Christianity could totally reject the Church. The Church and Christianity are so bound up, he feels, that to reject f~-ie is necessarily to reject the other. It is this notion which undercuts his whole chapter on "Blake and the Church." He picks out many valuable passages from Blake's works for comment but almost invariably misunderstands their meaning and their pervasive radicalism. If there is any doubt of the absurdities such a miscon ception can lead to, they are dispelled in the concluding comments of Davies' chapter. Just before he turns to a dis cussion of Blake1s relationship to Swedenborg in Chapter Three, Davies says, It is to Swedenborg we must now turn therefore for the further illumination of Blake's religious ideas, though we shall find cause to regret as the latter's doctrines In the discussion which precedes this quotation, Davies traces in detail the abuses in the church to which Blake objected. In the following discussion he goes on to enumerate those elements of the church with which Blake had sympathy. Although at one point he comes very close to the real issue— he says, "... he [Blake] was also opposed on principle to the ecclesiastical ideal of public worship; he did not see the need of it."— he seems on the whole to miss the thoroughgoing antiestablishmentarianism of Blake. Blake after all did not. object to established religion because it had no use, he rejected it because it was destructive and led to Ulro damnation. i 2 5 unfold before us that Blake was not a more obedient son of the Church and less of a mental and spiritual syncre- tist.6 How can anyone who has read Blake with as much care as Davies obviously has, look for "obedience" to the Church in Blake? Both errors— the assumption that Blake rejected Chris tianity and the assumption that he accepted the Christian establishment— arise from the same misconception. Chris tianity is usually taken, by most critics, to mean main stream "official" or establishment Christianity— Roman, Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist. There also seems to be the tacit assumption that orthodoxy is dependent on tradition, and that anything that does not somehow fit into the tradi tion of official Christianity is not Christianity at all. Although this is a view that official Christianity would like us to accept, it is not a necessary view. On the other hand, because the scholars and critics have realized that there is much in Blake's vision which resembles Christianity, because they have accepted that he does not belong to the tradition of the official church, and because they are unwilling to see him as completely idiosyn cratic, they have cast about for a heretical tradition to which he does belong. The tendency has been to look towards either Swedenborgianism or the occult, Cabbalistic tradi- 6p. 30. 26 tions. Although both of these have points of contact with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, they definitely fall outside the boundaries that circumscribe orthodox Christianity. And although Blake most definitely was influenced by both, link ing him too closely to these esoteric traditions has done much to make of Blake the raving crank that generations of lay readers took him to be. The amount of ink spilled by both those who assert and those who deny the importance of this influence indicates the discomfort critics feel in 7 forcing him into this camp. 7 There are several good discussions of the esoteric sources in Blake. I simply note them here. Besides J. G. Davies, The Theology of William Blake (Oxford, 1948), prob ably the most recent and thorough treatment of Blake1s eso teric sources is Kathleen Raine's new study, Blake and Tra dition (Princeton, 1968), a shorter but perhaps more satis fying treatment of the same material is Desiree Hirst, Hidden Riches; Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London, 1964). There are at least four other studies in the same area, all are more or less competent, George Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake (Chapel Hill, 1961), E. B. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (London, 1941), Milton 0. Percival, William Blake's Circle of Destiny (New York, 1939), and Helen C. White, The Mysticism of William Blake (Madison, 1927). There is no doubt, however, that by the time Blake comes to write Jerusalem he has consciously rejected the Hermetic and Cabalistic traditions. In Jerusalem 91:33-36, where Los finally comes to grips with the Spectre of Urthona and destroys him, Blake writes The Spectre builded stupendous works, taking the Starry Heavens Like to a curtain & folding them according to his will, Repeating the Smaragdine Table of Hermes to draw Los down Into the Indefinite, refusing to believe with out demonstration. Harold Bloom's commentary on this passage is: "In the final conflict with the Spectre of Urthona (91:32-57) Blake re jects all occultism, a point his myriads of esoteric ..................... 27 As I have already suggested, there is another approach , which adequately explains both the similarities of Blake's vision to Christianity, and his rejection of the official Church establishments. Blake fits comfortably into what we have called the primitive Christian tradition. For, al though various churches may have come out of primitive Christianity, it has no established church, no official dogma and is in fact thoroughly antiestablishmentarian. In some ways, primitive Christianity may be seen as the desper ate attempt to strip off all of the encrustations with which the established Church— any established church— has sur rounded and obscured the Word of God, to rediscover the meanings of Christ, and to claim the imminent realization of his eschatological promise--that is, the Kingdom of God that is within. Thomas J. J. Altizer, who has recently made himself notorious in the popular mind for proclaiming the Death of God, describes this tradition in his recent book, The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. interpreters have chosen not to understand. The Smaragdine Table of Hermes is the fundamental text in occult tradition, and is a brief statement of the correspondence of the super- sensual 'above' and tbe sensual ’below.’ Here it is an in cantation of the Spectre to trap Los in the 'below,* and therefore only another 'rational' mode of demonstration" (Erdman, p. 861). Northrop Frye says in "Blake after Two Centuries," Fables of Identity (New York, 1963), p. 146, "The occult and esoteric elements in his (Blake's] thought have been grossly exaggerated by critics who, as Johnson said of Hume, have not read the New Testament with atten tion." 28 Speaking of the state of theology today, he says, . . . it is also time for theology to return to the call of the radical reformers with their promise of a spirit- •ual Christianity which will usher in the third age of the Spirit. Prom the time of the early Franciscan Move ment such radical reformers have attacked the institu tional Church as the embodiment of the repressive author ity of the past; and they have called for a total compas sion and self-giving which is the consequence of a true participation in the new age of the Spirit, an eschato- logical time marking the full coming together of God and man. Radical Christian movements have always been either mystical or apocalyptic, and often they have been both; for in opposing a given form of religious meaning and moral law, they have sought a total convergence of flesh and Spirit making possible an immediate actualization of the eschatological promise of Jesus.® Although there are several notions in this quotation which we shall come to later, it is sufficient for the moment to notice that according to Altizer, and in this I must concur, opposition to all established forms of religion is charac teristic of what he calls "radical" and I have called primi tive Christianity. Therefore, Blake's antiestablishmentar- ianism, which has been used as evidence of his rejection of official Christianity, helps to move him into the tradition of primitive Christianity. Very early in its history, as Blake is quick to point out, Christianity was wedded to the state. In doing so, it denied its rightful bridegroom, Jesus Christ. Under Con stantine and Charlemagne, Christianity became political. The movement was slow but sure— from the church as handmaid to the state, to the church as bride of the state, to the Q (East Lansing, Michigan, 1967), p. xv. 29 church as Mistress. The same process was repeated in the sixteenth-century Protestant revolution. As Blake would have been quick to point out, even before the death of its founders, German Lutheranism and Swiss Calvinism had merely replaced the tyranny of a Roman Pope with the tyranny of Luther and Calvin. In selling its birthright as the Bride of Christ to become the Mistress of the state, the church was left with only the means of the state— social and polit ical revolution. This dangerous entanglement with the state, in fact with institutions of any sort, primitive Christianity has always most desperately resisted. And because they resisted this commitment, Christians from the time of Christ have been martyred— first by Jew and Roman, then by the Church of Rome, and finally by Protestants. Jesus was not killed be cause he claimed to be the messiah; the charge of blasphemy was a trumped-up charge. He was killed because he refused to succumb to the establishment1s expectations of the mes siah as political revolutionary and because his life and teachings threatened to cut the root of establishmentarian- ism itself. Blake understands this and makes the same point with characteristic vehemence in his annotation to Watson: Wherefore did Christ come? Was it not to^abolish the Jewish Imposture? Was not Christ murder'd because he taught that God loved all Men & was their Father & forbad all contention for Worldly prosperity in opposition to the Jewish Scriptures . . .? (K. 387) 30 To say that Jesus was killed because he became a threat to the whole religio-political structure of first-century Juda ism is no exaggeration. It was not that he threatened to supplant their establishment with another, as Barabbas had done. It was that he refused to acknowledge the right of any establishment to exist. Consequently, when the time came, the Jews chose Barabbas rather than Jesus, because, although a criminal, his breach had a definable place in their system. In fact, his breach asserted rather than 9 denied the validity of the right to rule. This conflict between the apostles of anarchy and the purveyors of established order, history was doomed to repeat, but almost always with tragic results as anarchists turned into rulers. The early Christians were killed by the Romans not because they refused to worship the pagan gods, but be cause they were considered politically dangerous. Not revo lutionist, but anarchist, was the charge brought against them again and again. As long as Christians remained faith ful to the apocalyptic vision of Christ, they were martyred. g Frye makes essentially the same point. He says, "In terms of moral good it is not the murderer or the robber but the prophet who is really evil. Barabbas may be safely re leased, for it is impossible that his robberies can destroy the social structure of Pilate and Caiaphas; but there is a deadly danger in Jesus and John the Baptist, who must be got rid of at all costs." Fearful Symmetry (Boston, 1947), p. 197. But slowly they began to accommodate themselves, until even tually Christianity had eased itself into Roman society as the dominant religion. Then under Constantine, Christianity became the state church of Rome; under Charlemagne, it be came the Holy Roman Empire— a church state. Christianity had come full circle. It was now committed to that which had once sought to destroy it, and it now sought to destroy 10 those who threatened what it was committed to. In 1415, John Huss was burned at the stake, not so much for the heresy of his doctrine, but because he threatened the exist ence of the hierarchical church. In 1418, fourty-four years after his death, John Wycliff was proclaimed a heretic. His bones were exhumed from consecrated ground and burned be cause he had taught that a believer could bypass the priest in his"approach to God and because there were those who be lieved him. The desperation of the Roman Church to destroy Luther in 1517 was not so much because he accused the pope of abuses, but because his teachings challenged the validity of the papacy. However, Luther had learned well from his Roman teachers. He too made alliances with the state. Long before he died, Lutheranism became a state religion. The conflict between Luther and Rome was now merely one political "^Roland H. Bainton, Early Christianity (New York, 1960), p. 59. "The entire relationship of the Church to the world was profoundly altered when the world ceased to be hostile to the Church. When, under Constantine, Christian ity came to be the favored religion of the empire, Christian aloofness naturally diminished." order battling another. If Luther had not made his accommo dations with the civil powers, he would perhaps have been doomed to Christ's failure and to Christ's victory. But, because of his commitments to the political establishment, he had to turn on those who refused to accommodate them selves. So Protestant martyred Protestant. I must assert clearly that I do not wish to tie Blake to any particular Christian sect or denomination which might have arisen out of the primitive tradition. He is not a sectarian, and any attempt to make him such must be doomed to failure. Although his views might touch theirs at cer tain points, he is not an Anabaptist or Methodist or pietist or Shaker or Quaker or any other kind of sectarian Chris tian. In fact, to try to establish his identity with any or all of these groups would be to deny my central thesis, that Blake belonged to a tradition which rejected all of these a!nd any other "form" of Christianity, in as much as all of them (no matter how well they began) eventually became established institutions, developed dogmas and fixed forms of worship, and tended toward defensive authoritarianism. In another passage from the same book, Altizer seems to both recognize and misunderstand the pervasive antiestablish- mentarian character of primitive Christianity. While both the proclamation of Jesus and the faith of primitive Christianity were fully apocalyptic, as Chris tianity evolved into its established orthodox form it progressively abandoned and dissolved its original apoca lyptic foundation. A wide variety of sectarian and heretical movements have repeatedly attempted to return 33. to Christianity’s original apocalyptic faith, but the movement of Christian history would seem to be irrevers ible, as the goal of recovering the primitive Christian faith has ever remained elusive.H It would seem to me that there is a curious "official" point of view operating here. If Mr. Altizer is lamenting the inability of primitive Christianity to reconstitute the orthodox Christian establishment in terms of its own apoca lyptic vision, he has not grasped the essence of primitive Christianity. Rarely if ever have those who belonged to the primitive tradition, that is, those who have grasped the radically non-institutional nature of Christ's message, tried to reform the official church. There is no other way to explain the multiplication of sects and denominations since the Reformation. The tendency has always been to leave the church. Before the Reformation the political arm of the Catholic church was strong enough to simply kill those who threatened it, or it was shrewd enough to make room for them within its own monolithic bosom and so rob them of their genius and dynamic. It is only with Martin Luther, when protestants made their own political alliances, that Christians were able to survive as a group outside the Catholic church and form their own establishments. But the impetus of primitive Christianity has always been to deny and reject the official church by leaving it. After the Reformation, groups have all too often left the "mother" 11 p. X . V 1 1 . __________ _____ 34, church with the idea of forming a new institution in the mistaken hope that the new institution would be better than the old. It is impossible to reawaken the apocalyptic vi sion in an institution, it can only be reborn in men. So the confrontation of the official church by primitive Chris tianity has always been with the idea of winning some to that vision. It has always recognized that vision and establishment are inimical contraries and ultimately only one can prevail. The official church can only embrace the full implication of the apocalyptic vision when it ceases to exist, when each member in the institution agrees to dis solve the institution, give up his worldly rights, and em brace the vision as an individual. This conflict, which we have so far outlined, between what I have called the official church and primitive Chris tianity, which from one point of view can be seen as a struggle between tyrannical power and individual freedom (and Blake in part sees it this way), demonstrates that there are at least two divergent Christian traditions. The judgment as to which is authentic arises from the point of view one adopts. Most critics have accepted the official church as authentic tradition; Blake would cast his lot for the other. Hans Rudi Weber has called them the "priestly tradition" and the "prophetic tradition" and sees the struggle between them as beginning in the earliest days of 35 12 Christianity. This struggle is essentially the same as the conflict between Blake's king-priest and poet-prophet. To these two traditions, as Blake viewed them, we must now turn. Priesthood and Kingship According to Blake, the priestly tradition begins with Caiaphas and the Jewish Sanhedrin and comes down to Blake's time through the church of Rome to the Protestant state religions— Anglicanism, Lutheranism and Calvinism. But, although Blake sees Caiaphas as the progenitor of the priestly tradition, he also traces it back through the Old Testament and the Jewish patriarchs to its ultimate source in Druidism, which he considers the source of all "State 13 Religions." There are several of Blake’s notions regard ing this tradition which must be made immediately clear. 12 "Laity in the Apostolic Church," Ecumenical Review,X (April 1958), 286-293. 13 There would seem to be a minor contradiction here in Blake. Although at times he seems to consider Caiaphas as the eponymous ancestor of the priesthood, he clearly vio lates this chronology by tracing the priesthood all the way back to the Druids. There is a lesson here in Blake's poetic method. His works evidence even less respect for historical accuracy and fact (which he would derisively as sociate with "memory," which stands in contrast to "vision," in his thought) than mofet poets; and poets are generally notorious for their habit of playing fast and loose with history. Blake's allegiance was to the essential truths of the human spirit, which can be found just as easily in myth (sometimes more easily) as in history, and which are per ceived through vision and not through memory. At the same time he displays an amazing ability to cut the surface and display the real import of historical movements and situa tions. If Caiaphas was the best, that is the most notorious, 36 First, in Blake's works, priesthood is almost always associated with kingship. He hardly ever mentions one with out the other. If Caiaphas is the progenitor of the 14 priestly line, Herod, king of Israel at the time of the crucifixion, becomes the progenitor of the kingly line. And ultimately Blake makes little distinction between Caiaphas and Herod. Second, both priest and king stand for established authority. Although one maintains power through "mystery" and the other by "war," each is equally preoccupied with maintaining authority. Thus, in Blake, priesthood-kingship and establishmentarianism go hand in hand. There can be no establishment without a priesthood and kingship, and priests and kings will always build an establishment. In fact, the two are almost synonymous. The death of one spells the death of the other; the birth of one always portends the birth of the other. Third, priesthood and kingship arise out of the "Spec- trous Selfhood" or Satan and seek for universal domination. Thus both priest and king are always repressive, constric- example of the priesthood (he was certainly the most avail able one), why should he not use him as the progenitor of all priests just because he appeared half-way down the family tree? And we must concede, Caiaphas does very nicely represent the spirit of priesthood in so many ways. ^Although the Herod of Jesus' time was actually te- trarch appointed by the Romans and not king, Blake does not make this distinction and calls him king probably because he represented political authority. 37 tive, tyrannical and seek the limitation of individual liberty and personal freedom. They seek it for two reasons. One, the desire for priesthood and kingship is born with the selfhood which is conceived out of the passion for dominion. And two, the very life of priesthood and kingship depends on its ability to smother non-conformity, stifle dissent and 15 crush rebellion, all of which it breeds. Fourth, because establishments are inherently repres sive and restrictive, they necessarily bear the seeds of revolt, for "war is energy Enslaved" (Four Zoas, 9:152). That is, it breeds the will to throw off those restrictions. Since rebellion is by nature reactionary, it can only exist if it has something to react to. If there were no estab lishments there would be no rebellion. However, the ulti mate irony is that rebellion is always ineffectual in eradi cating tyranny. The innocent belief in the essential purity of childhood desires and in the possibility of innocently satisfying them represented in Songs of Innocence,is per verted, in The Songs of Experience, into the belief that the desires of childhood are essentially evil and must be elimi nated if possible. But desires cannot be killed, at most they can be repressed and driven underground. In fact, far from being destroyed, the desires only become stronger with each new limitation which further frustrates their natural 15Cf. Appendix II. fulfillment. The desire for freedom is one of the strongest and seems to underlie all the rest. So, when restrictions become too oppressive the desire for liberty will inevitably break out in the form of rebellion. And the violence of the rebellion is directly proportional to the force with which repression has been imposed. This psychological pattern can easily be translated into the social order. When states or churches become too constrictive, when freedom becomes so narrowly limited that the bondage becomes intolerable, re volt will inevitably occur. Blake's growing disenchantment with political rebellion can be traced in his changing attitude to Ore. In Blake's mythology, Urizen stands for the forces of tyrannical op pression, and the Titan Ore, who is represented as a ser pent, stands for the spirit of revolt. Ore first appears as a character in America, where he becomes the focus of the revolution of the American colonies against a repressive and tyrannical English king. He is the serpent boy, the first born of Los, the creative spirit, and is associated with Christ, the spirit of redemption, which is all strong evi dence that Blake had considerable confidence, between 1790- 1795, in Ore's ability to overthrow tyranny and to establish 16 a state of freedom. Ore continues to play a major role in all of Blake's engraved works until we come to Milton, where 16 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Innocence and Experience; An Introduction to Blake (New Haven, 1964), pp. 47-87. 39 we find that his role has changed and his importance has diminished. In Jerusalem, he has all but disappeared. Although Blake may, in the early work, see hope (a hope born largely out of the early stages of the American and French Revolutions) in the ability of revolution to over throw tyranny, he gradually loses confidence in Ore's abil ity to effect any permanent change. The symptoms of this waning hope appear very early. A poem in the Rossetti MS. serves as an excellent example. It was written about 1793 and might well have been included in The Songs of Experience: I saw a chapel all of gold That none did dare to enter in, And many weeping stood without, Weeping, mourning, worshipping. I saw a serpent rise between The white pillars of the door, And he forc'd & forc'd & forc'd, Down the golden hinges tore. And along the pavement sweet, Set with pearls & rubies bright All his slimy length he drew, Till upon the altar white Vomiting his poison out On the bread & on the wine. So I turn'd into a sty And laid me down among the swine. (K. 163) Whether you read this lyric religiously or sexually makes little difference. Ultimately, in Blake, both are the same, and both are obviously intended. The serpent here echoes the worm in "The Sick Rose" (Songs of Experience) in its perverted and destructive sexuality, and is another mani festation of the serpent Ore in America. The rape which is ; described in stanzas 2, 3 and 4 is clearly an act of rebel lion against the tyrannical restrictions which are so suc cinctly presented in stanza 1. The chapel, which is made of gold to entice the worshipers to enter, is closed, and the worshipers must perform their worship from without, for "none did dare to enter in" [italics mine]- Although the rape of the chapel by the serpent arises directly out of the repression and fear which has made the chapel inaccessible, it also makes the divine body (as seen in the bread and 17 wine) inaccessible, but in a new way. If the priests have defiled the chapel by closing its doors, the serpent has defiled it with his poisonous vomit. Besides the vio lent language with which the poem's speaker describes the rape, his own reaction, which is clearly presented in the last two lines of the poem, demands that the reader also feel disgust. Repulsed by the self-righteous, tyrannical priesthood on the one hand and the serpent's defilement on the other, he turns into a "sty" (which strongly suggests a brothel among other things) and lies down among the "swine." We can recognize the speaker's descent into the brothel it self as a kind of bondage when we remember Blake's proverb from hell, "Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion" (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 8). Although this poem was probably written in 1793, 17 Hazard Adams, William Blake*; A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle, 1963), p. 240. 41 the same year that Blake engraved and printed America, Ore is not, in any sense, the same serpent boy who is so gener ously associated with Christ in the later poem. In fact, when we compare it with the passage from America, the con trast is overwhelming. We also begin to detect why Blake left this lyric out of The Soncrs of Experience: the concep tion of Ore in it was simply not sympathetic with what he wished Ore to be at this time: . . . "I am Ore, wreath'd round the accursed tree: "The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning 'gins to break; "The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands, "What night he led the starry hosts thro' the wide wilderness, "That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad "To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves; "But they shall rot on desart sands, & con sume in bottomless deeps, "To make the desarts blossom, & the deeps shrink to their fountains, "And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof; "That pale religious le[t]chery, seeking Virginity, "May find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty "The undefil'd, tho' ravished in her cradle night and morn; "For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life; "Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd. "Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consum'd; "Amidst the lustful fires he walks; his feet become like brass, "His knees and thighs like silver, & his breast and head like gold." { America 8:1-17) Much more to the point and much closer to the view of Ore that Blake finally came to hold, is another poem from the Rossetti MS. which was probably written some seven to ten years later. The poem which begins, "I saw a Monk of Charlemaine / Arise before my sight" was probably written between 1800 and 1803, just before Blake took up the task of writing Jerusalem, and eventually appears in two different forms, one in Jerusalem in a much shortened version and with a different emphasis in the preface to Chapter Three, the other in the Pickering MS. As it stands in the notebook, however, it is an anatomy of both the repressive wars of the tyrant, which lead to revolution, and the limitations of wars of revolution, which lead to a new tyranny. He also presents an alternative to revolution which we shall discuss later. Since the poem presents relatively few problems, and since it is such a clear statement of Blake's final view on the subject, it will be useful to quote the poem in its entirety: 1 I saw a Monk of Charlemaine Arise before my sight: I talk1d to the Grey Monk where he stood In beams of infernal light. 2 Gibbon arose with a lash of steel, And Voltaire with a wracking wheel. The Schools in Clouds of Learning roll'd Arose with War in iron & gold. 3 "Thou Lazy Monk," they sound afar, "In vain condemning Glorious War, "And in thy Cell thou shall ever dwell. "Rise, War, & bind him in his Cell,!'" 43 4 The blood red ran from the Grey monk's side, His hands & feet were wounded wide, His body bent, his arms & knees Like to the roots of ancient trees. 5 "I die, I die," the Mother said, "My Children will die for lack of bread. ■"What more has the merciless tyrant said?" The Monk sat down on her stony bed. 6 His eye was dry, no tear could flow, A hollow groan first spoke his woe. He trembl'd & shudder'd upon the bed: At length with feeble cry he said: 7 "When God commanded this hand to write "In the studious hours of deep midnight, "He told me that All I wrote should prove "The bane of all that on Earth I love. 8 "My brother starv'd between two walls; "His children's cry my soul appalls. "I mock'd at the wrack & griding chain: "My bent body mocks at their torturing pain. 9 "Thy father drew his sword in the north; "With his thousands strong he is marched forth; "Thy brother has armed himself in steel "To revenge the wrongs thy Children feel. 10 "But vain the sword & vain the bow, "They never can work war's overthrow. "The Hermit’s prayer & the widow's tear "Alone can free the world from fear. 11 "The hand of vengeance sought the bed "To which the purple tyrant fled. "The iron hand crush'd the tyrant's head "And became a tyrant in his stead. 12 "Untill the Tyrant himself relent, "The Tyrant who first the black bow bent, "Slaughter shall heap the bloody plain; "Resistance & war is the Tyrant's gain. 13 "But the Tear of Love & forgiveness sweet "And submission to death beneath his feet— "The tear shall melt the sword of steel, "And every wound it has made shall heal. 14 "For the tear is an intellectual thing, "And a sigh is the Sword of an Angel King, "And the hitter groan of the Martyr1s woe "Is an arrow from the Almightie's how." (K. 418-420) Once again, revolutionary war (stanza 9) breaks out because of the repressive measures of kings and priests (stanzas 1 to 6 and 8). But Blake clearly demonstrates in this poem the inability of revolution to conquer and destroy tyranny. Revolution is ineffectual because it must inevitably end up as tyranny (stanza 11). That is, revolution is cyclical. By using the same means as tyranny, it commits itself to a new tyranny. This process of eternally replacing one tyrant with another through violent revolution, Blake represents with his Or.c cycle: its symbol is the serpent, Ore, with its tail in its mouth. Again and again in Blake's poetry (cf. especially The Mental Traveller) the youthful revolu tionary, Ore, turns into the grizzled old tyrant, Urizen. As Northrop Frye has suggested, there is a neat irony con- 18 tained in the word "revolution" itself. It is vital to notice who the speaker of the poem is. He is a Monk, not a priest— a monk who has devoted himself to the religion of Jesus, which is the religion of love and forgiveness, and who resembles Jesus himself in many re spects (stanza 4). He recognizes that tyrants can be brought down only when tyranny has ended, and that tyranny 18 Fearful Symmetry, p. 218. T"....... " '.......... 45 can be ended only by employing means directly opposite to those employed by tyrants— that is, by forgiveness (stanza 13). And forgiveness is more than anything else the key notion in Jerusalem, where in the last pages, through for giveness, tyranny is finally brought to the grave, and all the redeemed cry, "Where is the Covenant of Priam, the Moral Virtues of the Heathen? "Where is the Tree of Good & Evil that rooted beneath the cruel heal "Of Albion's Spectre, the Patriarch Druid? where are all his Human Sacrifices "For Sin in War & in the Druid Temples of the Accuser of Sin, beneath "The Oak Groves of Albion that cover’d the whole Earth beneath his Spectre? "Where are the Kingdoms of the World & all their glory that grew on Desolation, "The Fruit of Albion's Poverty Tree, when the Triple Headed Gog-Magog Giant "Of Albion Taxed the Nations into Desolation & then gave the Spectrous Oath?" (Jerusalem 98:46-53) They have all vanished, and with their death, tyranny has also died. But before we can turn to the gospel of forgive ness and the end of tyranny we must pursue a fuller under standing of establishmentarianism. If Blake never expressed complete confidence in Ore's ability to effect permanent change alone, he nevertheless seemed at one time to believe— as in The French Revolution— that the inner redemption which he describes in the lyric above would naturally lead to, or be accompanied by, exter nal violent revolution. However, by the time we come to Jerusalem this has all changed. Ore has almost disappeared from his system. "Cruel War" and violent rebellion are associated exclusively with the forces of evil— the fallen Albion, Vala, Rahab and the Spectre of Luvah. In The Four 19 Zoas, which was written between 1795 and 1804, and which is almost as long as Jerusalem, Ore appears sixty-four times. Although there is strong evidence of the Ore cycle in The Four Zoas, Ore is still the major opponent to Urizen, and Ore is still Blake's major hope for ending Urizen's tyranny. In Milton, which was written after The Four Zoas and before Jerusalem, and which is half as long as those poems, Ore appears only sixteen times— one-fourth as often as in The Four Zoas. We also find that he has been brought down from his high place in America, for we are told that "Satan is the Spectre of Ore, & Ore is the generate Luvah" (29:34). In Jerusalem, which was written between 1804 and 20 1818, Ore appears only once. It seems obvious that in Jerusalem, Blake has discarded any hope of permanent change through revolution by any religious or political order. As we shall see in the final chapter, there can be no question that in Jerusalem the apocalypse comes through the intervention of Jesus and by Albion's act of forgiveness. There can also be no doubt that Los, Christ's prophet, is 19 For a discussion of the dating of The Four Zoas, cf. Appendix III. 20 For a discussion of the dating of Jerusalem, cf. Appendix III. 47 the temporal and earthly representative of the spirit of forgiveness. At the end of Jerusalem when Jesus is pro claiming his doctrine of forgiveness to Albion— a proclama tion which ultimately leads to Albion's redemption— we are told twice— once by the narrator and once by Albion him self— that Jesus appears in "the likeness & similitude of Los" (11:7 and 22). Although Blake seems to be suggesting in the final pages of The Four Zoas that the apocalypse is brought on by Los, when it actually comes, it is still Ore 21 and not Los who affects xt. It should also be noticed that this turning away from the doctrine of physical revolution to the revolutionary Fearful Symmetry, pp. 308-309. At the end of his chapter on The Four Zoas, Frye postulates that in spite of Blake's efforts to introduce Los as the chief agent of re demption, at the end of the poem, when the apocalypse fin ally occurs, it is Ore and not Los who is responsible for it. After quoting what he calls "Blake's Ode to Joy" (The Four Zoas 9:825-855) Frye says, "Has Blake’s Ode to Joy any inner logic connecting it with the rest of the work beyond a purely emotional requirement of an allegro finale? Certain ly there is little connection between its opening and the close of the preceding Night. The Last Judgment simply starts off with a bang, as an instinctive shudder of self- preservation against a tyranny of intolerable menace. If so, then it is not really the work of Los, though the open ing action is ascribed to him: it is the old revolutionary doctrine of a spontaneous reappearance of Ore, this time for some unexplained reason, to be the last one. What Los has actually been doing while the Antichrist has been growing in power is not clearly explained to us. There are attempts to explain it . . . but they do not really fit, and seem to be long to another poem. The Four Zoas has given us an imagin atively coherent account of how we got from an original Golden Age to the world we live in. It has not given us an imaginatively coherent account of how we can get from eight eenth century Deism to a Last Judgment through the power of Los, not Ore." 48: doctrine of forgiveness corresponds exactly to the final conclusions of primitive Christianity on this matter. Xt is in the primitive Christian groups such as the Quakers and the Anabaptists that we see the most active proponents of what has mistakenly been called "pacifism" but which was known to them as the doctrine of Christ's love. At the very center of the primitive Christian doctrine of love are the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and his petition— "Father forgive them." They felt that there was far more revolutionary power in one man dying in perfect love than in all the armies of the world. Fifth, because all establishments can only survive if built on an active priesthood and a warring kingship, and because both priest and king are always tyrannical, all establishments are to be condemned regardless of nature or origin— religious or political, Greek, Jewish or Christian. They all meet the same judgment in Blake's system. In the addresses to the Jews and to the Deists, which stand as prefaces to the second and third chapters of Jerusalem, Blake identifies Druidism, Judaism, Deism, estab lishment Christianity and Greek philosophy. He implies that each is guilty of the same error and condemns them all for it. He considers Druidism to be the primal religion (at times almost the primal false religion), and all religions, or at least religious establishments, are to be condemned inasmuch as they sprang from that source, or are guilty of 49 its errors. In the preface to Chapter Two, for example, Blake equates the Jews with the Druids by giving them a com mon ancestry: Your Ancestors derived their origin from Abraham, Heber, Shem and Noah, who were Druids, as the Druid Temples (which are the Patriarchal Pillars & Oak Groves) over the whole Earth witness to this day. (Jerusalem 27, prose) The judgment comes later in the preface, in a lyric which runs parallel to the structure of Jerusalem and describes the fall of Albion with the consequent destruction of Jerusalem, Satan's tyranny over the world, and the redemp tion of Albion with the consequent rebuilding of a New Jerusalem. Blake suggests that Druidical sacrifice is the cause of Albion's fall, and the Druid pillars which are raised over the fallen Jerusalem become the symbol of Satan's dominion of the world. Where Albion slept beneath the Fatal Tree, And the Druid'd golden Knife Rioted in human gore, In Offerings of Human Life? They groan'd aloud on London Stone, They groan1d aloud on Tyburn's Brook, Albion gave his deadly groan, And all the Atlantic Mountains shook. Albion's Spectre from his Loins Tore forth in all the pomp of War: Satan his name: in flames of fire He strech'd his Druid Pillars far. (Jerusalem, 27:29-40) Earlier in the same lyric, the Jewish synagogue, which Blake uses everywhere in his works as a symbol of Pharisaical 50 self-righteousness and legalism, is identified as "Satan's Synagogue": Lest Bahylon with cruel Og With Moral & Self-righteous Law Should Crucify in Satan's Synagoguel (Jerusalem, 27:22-24) The commendation of the Jews at the end of this preface ("If Humility is Christianity, you, 0 Jews, are the true Christians. . . . The Return of Israel is a Return to Mental Sacrifice & War. Take up the Cross, 0 Israel, & follow Jesus" (Jerusalem, 27, prose]) does not contradict the rest of the preface. It is based on the clear distinction, found both in Jerusalem and the Bible, between racial Judaism and the spiritual Israel. The part this distinction plays in Jerusalem will be the subject of the next chapter. In the address to the Deists (preface to Chapter Three), Blake adds Deism, establishment Christianity and Greek phil osophy to the list of false religions and asserts that they also sprang from Druidism and are identical to Pharisaical Judaism. At the top of the plate (52), Blake has engraved the words, "Rahab is an Eternal State." Around these words he has engraved a bracket which points directly to the title of the preface: "To the Deists." It seems that we are in-’ tended to infer that Deism is the State Rahab. What that state is and how Deism is a part of it, we find out immedi ately. In the first paragraph Blake writes. He never can be a Friend to the Human Race who is the Preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion; he is a flatterer who means to betray, to perpetuate Tyrant 51 Pride & the Laws of that Bahylon which he Forsees shall shortly be destroyed, with the Spiritual and not the Natural Sword. He is in the State named Rahab, which State must be put off before he can be the Friend of Man. (Jerusalem, 52, prose) It does not suit our purpose now to give a full analysis of the State Rahab. It is sufficient to emphasize that it is here characterized by natural morality, natural religion, flattery, betrayal, tyrant pride, the laws of Babylon and the natural sword— by which Blake means war— and that all of these characteristics will soon be attributed to Deism and all the other false religions. In the next paragraph, Blake defines what he means by natural morality and natural religion and asserts that it is the essence of Deism, that it comes from "Greek Philosophy (which is a remnant of Druidism)," and that it is the antithesis of revelation and the religion of Jesus, which is the true Christianity: You, 0 Deists, profess yourself the Enemies of Christian ity, and you are so: you are also the Enemies of the Human Race & Universal Nature. Man is born a Spectre or Satan & is altogether an Evil, & requires a New Selfhood continually, & must continually be changed into his direct Contrary. But your Greek Philosophy (which is a remnant of Druidism) teaches that Man is Righteous in his Vegetated Spectre: an Opinion of fatal & accursed consequence to Man, as the Ancients saw plainly by Reve lation, to the entire abrogation of Experimental Theory; and many believed what they saw and Prophecied of Jesus. (Jerusalem, 52, prose) The contrast which Blake sets up in the last lines between experimental theory and revelation suggests his antipathy for Newtonian physics and Lockian psychology which had robbed nature of its glory and man of his rightful divinity and had substituted a false or self-righteousness. But he r " 52 hated the proponents of experimental theory most of all be cause they insisted on "demonstration" as a substitute for faith and vision, and because "demonstration" had reduced man to a Vegetated Spectre. The Spectre of Luvah proclaims the Deist position in such a way as to make it impossible to misunderstand. The Spectre, who is. here identified with Arthur— the symbol of kingship— is also the spirit of Deism: But the Spectre, like a hoar frost & a Mildew, rose over Albion, Saying, "I am God, 0 Sons of MenI I am your Rational PowerI "Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man, "Who teach Doubt & Experiment? & my two Wings, Voltaire, Rousseau? "Where is that Friend of Sinners? that Rebel against my Laws "Who teaches Belief to the Nations & an unknown Eternal Life? "Come hither into the Desart & turn these stones to bread. "Vain foolish Manl wilt thou believe without Experiment "And build a World of Phantasy upon the Great Abyss, "A World of Shapes in craving lust & devouring appetite?" So spoke the hard cold constrictive Spectre: he is named Arthur, Constricting into Druid Rocks round Canaan, Agag & Aram & Pharoh. 2 (Jerusalem, 54:15-26) The church, on.the other hand, propagates self-righteousness by demanding a legalistic adherence to a moral code. 22 There are many similarities between this passage and the passage which I have explicated in detail in Appendix II, and the discussion there throws a great deal of light on the present point. 53 Although they go by different routes, both Deism and the church arrive at the same error. And both are tyrannical in their accusations of those who either do not accept or do not live up to their standards of righteousness. In the fifth stanza of the lyric in the same preface, Blake prophe cies that the efforts of both the state church and the Deists to overcome the religion of Jesus will be in vain: Titus! Constantine! Charlemaine! 0 Voltaire! Rousseau! Gibbon! Vain Your Grecian Mocks & Roman Sword Against this image of his [the Monk's] Lord. (Jerusalem, 52:17-20) Neither the three "Christian" monarchs, by warfare, nor the three Deists, by mockery, will be able to overthrow the humble monk, who is the embodiment of the religion of Jesus. For any who might still be in doubt as to the sweep and bitterness of Blake's attack on all established forms of religion, the next paragraph must present conclusive evi dence. It is unique for its unflinching and all-encompass ing condemnation, even in Blake, who had the habit of making such sweeping and venomous attacks: Man must & will have Some Religion: if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan & will erect the Synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of this World, God, and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the Name of God. Will any one say, "Where are those who worship Satan under the Name of God?" Where are they? Listen! Every Religion that Preaches Vengeance for Sin is the Religion of the Enemy & Avenger and not of the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, Named by the Divine Name. Your Religion, O Deists! Deism, is the Worship of the God of this World by the means of what you call Natural Religion and Natural Phil osophy, and of Natural Morality or Self-Righteousness, the Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart. This was the 54 Religion of the Pharisees who murder'd Jesus. Deism is the same & ends in the same. (Jerusalem, 52, prose) In A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake makes almost the same accusation of the church. "The Modern Church Crucifies Christ with the Head Downwards" (K. 615), he says, suggest ing both its destructive tyranny and its perversion of Christianity by turning its values upside down. There is no place at which Christianity and the established church meet. The gulf has been opened: "if he [man] has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan." And he who has Satan for God is in the state named Rahab. There are some, even in the light of such explicit denunciations, who persist in the attempt to exonerate one or the other of the parties whom Blake here condemns. Mr. Davies, as we have seen, tries to lift the burden of Blake's attack from the church, Harold Bloom from the Deists. In his commentary on this plate Bloom says, There•is not much accuracy, one fears, in Blake's indict ment of historical Deism, and indeed by "the Deists" he does not mean Toland, Collins, Tindal and the other con- trovertialists who argued for the religion of Nature against the Anglican orthodoxy of their day. Blake means the orthodoxy of his day, a Church of England that had covertly assimilated many Deist attitudes. Primar ily he means Rahab, the Eternal State Religion, the or ganized violence carried out in the names of Jesus and Jehovah. [Italics B l o o m ' s ]23 There can be no doubt that Blake has not only English Angli canism in mind, but Scottish Presbyterianism, German Luther- 23 Poetry and Prose, p. 855. 55 anism, Swiss Calvinism, and Roman Catholicism as well. In short, and here Bloom is certainly right, he has in mind Rahab or any establishment state religion. But there can also be no doubt that Blake meant Deists and Deism when he says Deists and Deism. The distinction which Bloom seems to be making between "the religion of Nature1 1 and Blake's "Natural Religion" is certainly subtle, and does not reveal itself easily. Frye is much closer to the case when he says, In Deism there is not only the belief that the physical world is the only real one, but also a feeling of satis faction at remaining within it, a certain enthusiasm about accepting the conditions it imposes. Now it seems reasonable enough to take the world as we find it, try ing to be as contented as possible and make others so, * without straining after more elusive pleasures, perhaps less substantial ones. But if it were possible to do this the human race would have settled into Utopian serenity centuries ago. It remains true that the physi cal world is not good enough for the imagination to accept, and if we do accept it we are left with our Self hoods. Our verminous crawling egos that spend all their time either wronging others or brooding on wrongs done to them. The end of all natural religion, however well- meaning and good-natured, is a corrupt and decadent so ciety rolling down hill to stampeding mass hysteria and maniacal warfare. This is the historical succession to Deism which Blake in Jerusalem symbolizes as "Druidism" In fact, Blake would include in his roll call of false reli gions any person who devises a doctrine and then is swal lowed by it, like Jonah by the whale. If his life is dependent on the whale, he is bound to lie and distort, to become apologetic and polemical to preserve the whale. And 24 Fearful Symmetry. p. 68. 56 in his defense, he will become oppressive and tyrannical. His only salvation, like Jonah's, is to he delivered from, the whale. Blake's clearest statement of this process is in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He says, 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-perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advan tage 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 pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. (Plate 11) When essential poetic truths, which are everyone's property, are abstracted and turned into a "system" and from the sys tem, in turn, "forms of worship" are devised, there will be those who claim the privilege of interpreting the system and administering the forms. These are the priests, and they have by their very position a stronghold where they may hide and protect themselves, and from which they may attack those who challenge their system or deny its forms. Sixth, Blake seems to consider all churches as estab lishments, and thus all are ultimately culpable. Blake does not only object to the abuses of the church, although he does that; he objects to the very existence of the church. Partly his objection stems from its close relationship with " "" 57 the state. Finally, in Blake's works, church and state merge into one and become "State Religion." Although this notion has been adequately reflected above, it must be emphasized because of its importance to the following dis cussion. In the seventy-fifth plate of Jerusalem, where Blake lists the "Twenty-seven Heavens & their Churches" (line 10), he seems to use the word "church" as a general synonym for establishment, in this passage, Blake traces the priestly tradition all the way back to Adam. He has divided the twenty-seven churches— by their priests, as it were— into three groups and briefly identifies each group by its dis tinctive characteristics. The first group stretches from Adam to Lamech: these are "the Giants mighty, Hermaphro- dotic" (lines 10-12). The second group is from Noah to Terah: "these are the Female Males, / A Male within a Female hid as an Ark & Curtains” (lines 13-15). The third group is from Abraham to Luther: "these . . . are the Male Females, the Dragon Forms, / The Female hid within a Male . . ." (lines 16-18). This last group and the final identi fication of all twenty-seven as Rahab are most interesting for our present discussion: Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Paul, Constantine, Charlemaine, Luther: . . . thus Rahab is reveal'd, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Abomination of Desolation, Religion hid in War, a Dragon red & hidden Harlot. (Jerusalem, 75:16-20) 58 The rationale for including Constantine, Charlemagne and Luther in this list is evident from our discussion above. Under Constantine, Christianity became political. Charlemagne established the Holy Roman Empire. Luther was the first Protestant establishmentarian. Why Abraham, Moses and Solomon were included is also not difficult to under stand. Abraham is the father of the Jewish nation, and with the substitution of the ram for his son Isaac in the sacri fice on Mt. Nebo, Judaism can be said to have begun. Moses gave the law, both moral and ceremonial, and thus gave the occasion for the rise of the Jewish priesthood. And under Solomon the temple was built, the ceremonial law was fixed, and the priesthood became firmly established. To find the Apostle Paul in this list is a bit more puzzling. However, the very next plate, which is the preface to the third chap ter ("To the Christians"), begins to suggest an answer. One of the epigraphs to that plate is "'Saul, Saul, / Why perse- cutest thou me?'" It is an allusion to Paul's conversion on the Damascus road (Acts 9 and 22) and reminds us that he was the first to persecute the Christians. But Paul was also the first Christian authoritarian and did for Christianity much of what Moses and Solomon did for Judaism. Although Jerusalem reflects many Pauline notions, Blake cannot blink those facts. Finally, the more rigid rationalism of the Pauline Epistles has always been more congenial to the establishment churches than the more imaginative Gospels and Johannine writings, which have been the favorites of those in the primitive traditions, and of course, of Blake. All of the heavens and their churches are here revealed to us for what they are— Rahab. We have already indicated that Rahab usually stands, in Blake's works, for state reli gion. She is in fact an almost exact equivalent of what we have called priestly Christianity. She is associated throughout Jerusalem with priests and kings and is guilty of all their abuses and embodies the peculiar evils of estab- lishmentarianism. Here, in the last three lines of the passage from Jerusalem 75, Blake has given us the most con centrated revelation of those abuses and evils to be found anywhere in Jerusalem. The epithets which he here hurls at Rahab seem cryptic, but they turn out to be not only under standable but thorough and incisive, if we hunt down all the ideas and images which cluster around them in the poem. First, Rahab is called "Mystery." Mystery suggests all that is hidden and difficult to understand, and implies a limitation of perception or vision. It is interesting to note that the Greek word mysterion, from which our word mystery comes, is used some two dozen times in the New Test ament. Whether Blake was aware of it or not, it is signifi cant that in the New Testament mysterion means something quite different from mystery— the word it is translated by in the King James version. Mystery refers to that which can be known only by the initiated, and suggests insights which 60 can only be gained by those who have/ or can claim to have, special powers of understanding. Mysterion, on the other hand, refers to that which has always been evident to every one and which no one has seen because no one has looked, but which is now made evident to all. In fact, it would be more accurate to translate mysterion as revelation or vision. And as Northrop Frye says, "It is a paradox [I would say, a grave error] to associate revelation, or vision, with what 25 we do not know, rather than with what we can see." On this point Blake is essentially in accord with the gospels. That which is there for all to behold has been filched and hidden by the priests and has been made into a weapon for oppression. That which was intended to liberate has been used to bind. In his annotations to Berkeley's Siris, Blake writes, "Jesus supposes every Thing to be Evi dent to a Child & to the Poor & Unlearned. Such is the Gospel" (K. 774). As Blake understands it, the claim to special insight is merely a defensive tactic of the priest hood, to keep itself well established and to keep the op pressed from finding out that its foundation— mystery— is sand. In The Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Providence, Swedenborg says, . . . if he [the reader] be one of a sincere and humble mind . . . his Humility and Sincerity will teach him, that Nothing doth IN GENERAL so contradict Man's natural and favorite Opinions as TRUTH, and that all the grandest ^ Fearful Symmetry, p. 383. 61 and purest Truths of Heaven must needs seem obscure and perplexing to the natural Man at first View— To this Blake replies, Lies & Priestcraft. Truth is Nature. Swedenborg continues, — until his intellectual Eye becomes accustomed to the Light, and can thereby behold it with satisfaction— Now Blake has caught Swedenborg's real direction, and he retorts, — that is; till he agrees to the Priests' interest. (K. 131) According to Blake, truth for the priesthood is that which serves its own interest best. And those who do not cater to that interest can be convicted of heresy and burned. The word "Mystery" appears only twice more in Jerusa lem. In plate ninety-three it appears in exactly the same context as it does in the passage we are now discussing. In plate eighty-three, Los encourages the Daughters of Beulah to nail Vala and Luvah to the "stems of Mystery." Neither passage gives us much of a clue as to exactly what Blake means by "mystery." If, however, we turn to The Four Zoas, where the word appears thirty-seven times, and note what it is associated with there, we begin to see exactly what Blake intends with the word, and how it works in Jerusalem. In The Four Zoas it refers first of all to the "tree of Mystery." "For this Lake is form'd from the tears & sighs & death sweat of the Victims "Of Urizen's laws, to irrigate the roots of the tree of Mystery." (8:238-239) j " ........................ 62 The "tree of Mystery" which reminds us of the "stems of Mystery" in the eighty-third plate of Jerusalem, is also the "tree of Good and Evil." Satan makes this identifica tion explicit in one of the supplementary passages to The Everlasting Gospel; "Am I not Lucifer the Great "And you my daughters in Great State, "The fruit of my Mysterious Tree "Of Good & Evil & Misery "And Death & Hell, which now begin "On everyone who Forgives Sin?" (K. 759) The tree of good and evil appears throughout Jerusalem and stands in contrast to the tree of life. It is primarily a symbol of the moral law. After Albion has fallen, the poet tells us, Cold snows drifted around him: ice cover'd his loins around. He sat by Tyburn's brook, and underneath his heel shot up A deadly Tree: he nam'd it Moral Virtue and the Law Of God who dwells in Chaos hidden from the human sight. (Jerusalem, 28:13-16) Albion'.s loins are frozen because the laws of sexual prohi bition are the most striking example of the evils of the moral law. The tree is "deadly" because the priesthood uses the moral law to establish its own righteousness (which turns out to be self-righteousness) and to judge and condemn those who do not live up to its demands. Thus it also be comes the tree of death. And in The Four Zoas, Jesus is crucified on "the tree of Mystery" (8:326). The tree of mystery then, is also the cross, which suggests both the sacrifice of the sinner and the whole Jewish ceremonial sys tem. This leads us to the second symbol of mystery in The Four Zoas. In the eighth night of The Four Zoas, Enion, who is in the grave, hears the voice of the "field" proclaim, "'Listen. I will tell thee what is done in the caverns of the grave. "'The Lamb of God has rent the Veil of Mystery, soon to return 11' In Clouds & Fires around the rock & the Mysterious tree.1" (8:555-557) The Lamb of God is, of course, Jesus, and his rending of the veil of mystery is an allusion to the veil of the temple in Jerusalem which was rent from top to bottom at the moment that Christ died on the cross. The veil partitioned the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple. It was in the 26 Holy of Holies that the Ark of the Covenant was kept. It is not surprising, then, that in Jerusalem we find a cluster of symbols drawn from the temple which reveals to us what Blake meant by mystery. (However, instead of the temple, Blake prefers to use its primitive form— the tabernacle, 26 Although by Jesus' time the Ark had long disappeared, and so was no longer kept in the Holy of Holies, Blake fails to make this historical distinction. He takes the incident of the rending of the veil of the temple and the fact that the Ark was kept in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle and brings the two elements together for symbolic reasons. And there is no reason why he should not. If he was guilty of historical anachronism, he was not wrong about the nature and place of the Jewish priesthood. 64 which was constructed under the guidance of Moses during the wandering in the wilderness, and which later became the model for the temple. The temple Blake reserves for the Druids— almost all the temples in Jerusalem are Druid temples.) In Jerusalem, the "ark" (sometimes called the "secret ark"), the Holy of Holies (usually called the "holy place" or the "secret place"), the "veil" (also called the "curtains") and the "tabernacle" (sometimes the "secret tabernacle," the "beautiful tabernacle" or the "fleshly tabernacle") form a symbol cluster which is always associ ated with priests, kings, moral law (particularly, as we shall soon see, with laws of sexual restriction) with war and with false religion. And one of the threads which binds the whole cluster together is the emphasis on the secrecy and mystery of the inner tabernacle. In order to understand what Blake intends by this sym bol cluster it is important to know that it almost always looks in two directions— to the religio-political establish ment on the one hand, and to the religion of sexuality on the other. In Blake, ultimately both become the same thing. In the next chapter we will see how Blake uses sex as a religious metaphor to draw a distinction between virginity and circumcision, which correspond to self-righteousness and forgiveness, respectively. Here we must see how he uses it as a symbol of religious repression and mystery. The "femi nine tabernacle" on one level is quite literally the female ; .......................... " . 65 sexual organ. Each part of the tabernacle— the covering cherubs over the ark, the veil which hangs before the ark, and the holy place in which the ark is hidden— corresponds exactly to some part of the female genitals. Just as in the lyric, "I saw a chapel built of gold," two forces are oper ating here. The female entices the male to enter the secret tabernacle (the beauty of the tabernacle itself is suffi cient enticement), but when the male moves to comply with the invitation, she denies him fulfillment. She denies him because of the moral law which commands that virginity in itself is good and any participation in sex is of itself bad. The desires, which, in the male, are thus simultan eously aroused and frustrated, are released in war, which is turned to the advantage of the tyrant who imposed the laws in the first place. Through enticement the tyrant assures himself of warriors to fight his wars of repression. And when we remember that it is Rahab who becomes the Whore of Babylon, and who, in one form or another— as Rahab, Vala or Tirzah— becomes the chief object of worship by the spectrous sons of Albion; and then when we remember that Rahab is also state religion, and that the king and priest are ultimately one in Blake's mind, then we can see that the religion of sexuality and the religion of the state are also ultimately one. 66 In Jerusalem, Los tells us that "In Beulah the Female lets down her beautiful Tabernacle "Which the Male enters magnificent between her Cherubim "And becomes One with her ..." (30;34-36) This is as it should be. Each man should have free and un limited access into the holy place. But Blake realizes that in this world it is rarely so. In this fallen world, the sons of Albion become the forces of the Spectre of Luvah, who is Satan. The female has become a closed tabernacle with "thou shalt not" written over the gate. The warriors who are filled with lust and frenzied with denial fall prey to the torments of Tirzah1 s taunts, until they "cry in the hot day of Victory," "Look! the beautiful Daughter of Albion sits naked upon the Stone, "Her panting Victim beside her: her heart is drunk with blood "Thoi her brain is not drunk with wine: she goes forth from Albion "In the pride of beauty, in the cruelty of holiness, in the brightness "Of her tabernacle & her ark & secret place: the beautiful Daughter "Of Albion delights the eyes of the Kings: their hearts & the "Hearts of their Warriors glow before Thor & Friga." (Jerusalem, 68:10-17) And again they cry, "Why trembles the Warrior's limbs when he beholds they beauty "Spotted with Victim's blood? by the fires of thy secret tabernacle "And thy ark & holy place, at thy frowns, at thy dire revenge, ............................... 67 « » "Smitten as Uzzah of Old, his armour is soften'd, his spear "And sword faint in his hand from Albion across Great Tartary." (Jerusalem, 68:48-52) Or, pushed to the edge of rape, "'If you dare rend their Veil with your Spear, you are healed of Love.'" (Jerusalem, 68:42) The victim is just such a one who has torn the veil, who against all the laws of morality has entered the holy, secret place, and who must be sacrificed for his sins. Hie chief threat to this feminine plot, and therefore the only hope, is Jerusalem. She "IS NAMED LIBERTY/ AMONG THE SONS OP ALBION" (Jerusalem, 26, title). She is the Bride of the Lamb. Their union, which reflects the union of male and female in Beulah, removes the curse which tyrants have been so desperate to pronounce on sexual union. So Gwendolen, one of the Daughters of Albion, who eventually assimilates into Rahab, purposes to pervert even this hope: "Let us lead the stems of this Tree [of Mystery], let us plant it before Jerusalem, "To judge the Friend of Sinners [Jesus] to death without [i.e. outside of] the Veil, "To cut her off from America, to close up her secret Ark "And the fury of Man exhaust in War, Woman permanent remain." (Jerusalem, 82:32-35) Throughout the poem the forces of evil are plotting to pre vent the marriage of the bride and the Lamb. If they can turn Jerusalem, the stronghold of liberty, into a secret feminine tabernacle, the battle will be won. as; If the "secret place" (i.e. the Holy of Holies) and the tabernacle as a whole stand for feminine tyranny, the veil of the tabernacle seems to stand specifically for the moral law. It is easy to see how this comes to be. Sexual denial, as we have seen is demanded by the law with the purpose of preserving chastity or righteousness. Those who violate this law {i.e. who enter where they have no right) are de stroyed by guilt and become the victims of the punishment of those who claim moral righteousness for themselves. These punishments are the cruel sacrifices of the guilty on the Druid or Dragon altars, presided over by Vala-Rahab, the goddess of the religion of chastity. The altars are set up by the fallen Albion, and Albion falls because he falls under the demands of the moral law and is destroyed by his own sense of guilt over his sexual relationship with Jerusa- lem-Vala. So Albion proclaims Jerusalem a harlot and ban ishes her, and then mends the veil which he has rent in Vala {Jerusalem, 20-25). And the veil which he rent, he mends with cruel laws. His [Albion's] fires redound from his Dragon Altars in Errors returning. He drew the Veil of Moral Virtue, woven for Cruel Laws, And cast it into the Atlantic Deep to catch the Souls of the Dead. {Jerusalem. 23:21-23) Then Albion curses his sons. And his curse is reminiscent of King Lear's curse on his daughters: ".... 69 "Blasphemous Sons of Feminine delusion! God in the dreary Void "Dwells from Eternity, wide separated from the Human Soul. "But thou, deluding Image [Jerusalem], by whom imbu'd the Veil I rent, "Lo, here is Vala's Veil whole, for a Law, a Terror & a Curse! "And therefore God takes vengence on me: from my clay-cold bosom "My children wander, trembling victims of his Moral Justice: "His snows fall on me and cover me, while in the Veil I fold "My dying limbs. Therefore 0 Manhood, if thou art aught "But a meer Phantasy, hear dying Albion's Curse! "May God, who dwells in this dark Ulro & voidness, vengence take, "And draw thee down into this Abyss of sorrow and torture, "Like me thy Victim. 0 that Death & Annihilation were the same!" (Jerusalem, 23:29-40) The reason for Blake's choice of the veil as a specific sym bol of the law becomes evident if we look into its position in the Bible. The writer to the Hebrews gives us a descrip tion of the Holy of Holies. He says, And after the second veil, [was] the tabernacle which is called the Holiest of all; which had the golden censer and the ark of the convenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant; and over it the cherubims of glory shadowing the mercy seat; of which we cannot now speak particularly. (Hebrews 9:3-5) The veil was used to separate the Holy of Holies from the rest of the tabernacle. Behind the veil, in the Holy of Holies, was kept the ark. The ark was the central symbol of the presence of God among the Hebrews. The full signifi cance of the objects which were kept in the ark is sometimes 70 difficult and obscure in the Bible. "The tables of the covenant" needs to be explored, however, for it sheds much light on Blake's notion of the veil and its relationship to law and mystery. The ark was called the ark of the covenant because in it were kept the tables of the covenant. These were "the two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God" (Exodus, 31:18), which contained all the law which was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is easy to see how the ark and the Sinaitic law came to be closely identified in the mind of Old Testament Judaism. But by Sinaitic law, we mean not only the decalogue, but the whole range of ceremonial law as well, which was firmly estab lished while the Israelites wandered in the Wilderness. In fact, they were kept in the wilderness until they learned to obey this law. It was through this law that the priesthood finally got their firm hold on the Jewish people. For it was kept carefully hidden away in the Holy of Holies behind the veil. There, only the priests had access to it, even more, only the high priest had access to it. So only the priests could claim the right to interpret it, and only the priests could claim the knowledge of how to perform its de mands. And as so often happens, when a few have special 27 rights, they can use the rights to their own best advantage. 27 This did, in fact, happen. There is at least a clue to how it happened in one of the other symbols contained in the Ark— Aaron's rod. Aaron is a shadowy character in much 71 Although in point of fact, the Torah was copied and recopied so that by New Testament times many people had their own copy, the ark and the actual tablets of stone maintained a powerful hold on the people and represented a special privi lege due only to the priesthood. There seems to be a gradual change in the Old Testament in the nature and frequency of access to the ark. Although it was kept in the Holy of Holies from the very beginning, we find in the Pentateuch that it was before the ark that Moses repeatedly communed with God. And Moses, for all his importance in early Jewish history, was not even a priest, let alone a high priest. It would seem, therefore, that access to the ark was fairly easy, although it was by no of the Bible, and there is some disagreement among the orig inal "documents" from which the Pentateuch was redacted as to his place and role in early Israelitish history. Only in P_ the "priestly document" does he emerge as a real and sig nificant character. There, he is unquestionably considered as the eponym of the Levitical priesthood. In fact, in p_, he is given a place almost equal in importance with Moses. E and J are not so complimentary. Extra-Biblical, Jewish tradition has also generally been consistent in considering him the eponym of the Levitical priesthood. However, even as late as Ezekiel there is still some question as to this claim, and it is suggested that Zadok was the eponym of the priestly line. The story of the budding of Aaron's rod has to do with God's choice of Aaron and the Levites for the priesthood over all other contenders. Since the story is found only in it would seem that perhaps it was there to make the Levitical claim to the priesthood firm. Most prob ably the rod is present in the Ark for the same reason. After all, the Levites were the caretakers of the Tabernacle (later the Temple) , they alone had access to the Ark, and the Holy of Holies was their own special stronghold. It is also interesting that the only full description of the Ark is confined to P.. Cf. M. W. Jacobus, A New Standard Bible Dictionary (London,1926), pp. 15 an d 64. means without restriction. The Holy of Holies became more and more inaccessible, however, until only the high priest was allowed to enter, and then only on one day a year (the Day of Atonement), and only after special ceremonial cleans ing. It is easy to see the power this gave the priesthood. The ark became Judaism's most important symbol. There are plenty of stories in the Old Testament of its power. It became in the popular mind a kind of paladium in war. In Joshua 6, for example, it was at the head of the procession around the walls of Jericho. In I Samuel, Saul, against the command of Samuel, dragged it into battle in a last desper ate attempt to beat the Philistines and lost it to the enemy. In the Philistine camp, it wrought havoc and de struction until it was returned to Israel. In II Samuel, Uzzah (the same Uzzah who appears in Jerusalem, 68:51) dies because he sacriligiously steadied the ark when it was being brought to Jerusalem by David. At any rate, so closely was the priesthood related to the ark, that it is impossible to say whether the priests got their power from the ark, or the ark from the priests. Therefore the veil becomes a very convenient symbol for mystery and the moral law, because it hides the law and it is the law it hides. Law and mystery are the foundation stones of established religious power or priesthood. Obvi ously, the one who has access has a hold on those who don't. Blake seems to be suggesting that if there are mysteries, j ■ 7 3 there will always be those who claim to understand them. And because those mysteries always have a way of turning out to be laws, those who can make that claim have a hold on those who cannot. Consequently, those who deny the exist ence of mysteries, deny the existence of laws and so threaten to break the control. They must be either sub verted or destroyed. In Jerusalem, the daughters of Albion try to save themselves by subverting the Divine Vision: "We Women tremble at the light, therefore hiding fearful "The Divine Vision with Curtain & Veil & fleshly Tabernacle." (Jerusalem, 56:39-40) They "tremble at the light" because light threatens to expose the darkness of mystery and reveal it for what it is— nothing. When subversion fails, the rebel must be de stroyed. So, in "A Little Boy Lost," the boy who "sets reason up for judge / Of our most holy Mystery" (K. 218) is burned by the priest, and in The Four Zoas, Jesus is cruci fied on the "tree of Mystery" (8:326). But as we shall soon see, the sacrifice of this victim was no ordinary sacrifice. Thus "nail’d . . . upon the tree of Mystery" (Four Zoas, 8:326) and ". . .in the caverns of the grave / The Lamb of God . . . rent the Veil of Mystery" (Four Zoas, 8:555-556). There is evident irony in the fact that Rahab is "reveal'd" by her "mysteries." That is, Rahab's attempt to ; hide the truth reveals to us what she really is. As Blake repeatedly proclaims, truth, by its very nature, is .......74 perceptible. It lies only in the definite and the particu lar. That which is hidden/ mysterious and confused is a negation and error. As the "Living Creatures" say, "The Infinite alone resides in the Definite & Determinate Identity; "Establishment of Truth depends on destruc tion of Falsehood continually." (Jerusalem, 55:64-65) Northrop Frye is certainly correct when he says, "The only defence of error is confusion and mystery, and . . . every victory of imaginative vision consolidates a body of error into a comprehensible form and makes it obviously erron- 28 eous.” Frye’s comment comes very close to what Los says, "Yet why despair? I saw the finger of God go forth "Upon my Furnaces from within the Wheels of Albion1s Sons, "Fixing their Systems permanent, by mathematic power "Giving a body to Falsehood that it may be cast off for ever, "With Demonstrative Science piercing Apollyon with his own bow. "God is within and without: he is even in the depths of Hell'" (Jerusalem, 12:10-15; italics mine) An excellent example of how a determinate form is given to Falsehood, and how it is cast off even by those who lived by it, appears at the end of Jerusalem. Gwendolen, one of the daughters of Albion, trys to persuade the rest of her sis ters of the advantages of their ways. The hideous sacrifice of Luvah has already taken place, they see the Last Judgment 28 Fearful Symmetry, p. 357. 75 approaching, and they are understandably afraid. Then Gwendolen says, "Unless we find a way to bind these awful forms to our "Embrace, we shall perish annihilate? dis cover'd our Delusions." So saying she took a Falsehood & hid it in her left hand To entice her Sisters away to Babylon on Euphrates. And thus she closed her left hand and utter1d her Falsehood, Forgetting that Falsehood is prophetic: she hid her hand behind her, Upon her back behind her loins & thus utter'd her Deceit: "I heard Enitharmon say to Los: 'Let the Daughters of Albion "'Be scatter'd abroad and let the name of Albion be forgotten.'" "Look, Hyle is become an infant Love! lookI behold! see him lie "Upon my bosom; look! here is the lovely way ward form "That gave me sweet delight by his torments beneath my Veil! So saying. She drew aside her Veil, . . . Discovering her own perfect beauty to the Daughters of Albion And Hyle a winding Worm beneath . . . & not a weeping Infant Trembling & pitying she scream'd & fled upon the wind. (Jerusalem, 82:3-51) As long as Hyle is hidden beneath the mysterious veil, Gwendolen can make any claim she wishes about him. But when the veil is drawn aside (or in the larger context, when the veil of the tabernacle is rent), the mystery is revealed in : all its horror. In a sense, the daughters of Albion are themselves delusions of the fallen Albion, and as Gwendolen herself knows, when they are discovered to be delusions they "perish annihilate." Wien error and falsehood, whose only cover is mystery, are subjected to the revealing light of vision, they disappear, for delusions must have darkness to live. Or to put it yet another way, vision and the rejec tion of falsehood are simultaneous. So, in this passage there is an antithesis between revelation and mystery. One is definite and true; the other is indefinite and false. And when Rahab takes on the definite form of mystery, she is perceived to be false and can be rejected. If we return again to the passage from Jerusalem 75 cited above, we learn still more about Rahab in the next epithet. She is called "Babylon the Great." In both Jerusalem and the Old Testament, Babylon stands (along with ; Egypt) in contrast to the city of Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, while Albion is lamenting his fall, he describes both Jerusalem and Babylon in a way that draws a sharp contrast between them: “0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, I have forsaken thy Courts, "Thy Pillars of ivory & gold, thy Curtains of silk & fine "Linen, thy Pavements of precious stones, thy Walls of pearl "And gold, thy Gates of Thanksgiving, thy Windows of Praise, "Thy Clouds of Blessing, thy cherubims of Tender-mercy 77 \ "Streching their Wings sublime over the | Little-ones of Albion! "O Human Imagination, 0 Divine Body I have Crucified, "I have turned my back upon thee into the Wastes of Moral Law. "There Babylon is builded in the Waste, founded in Human desolation. "0 Babylon thy Watchman stands over thee in the night, "Thy severe Judge all the day long proves thee, 0 Babylon, "With provings of destruction, with giving thee thy hearts desire; "But Albion is cast forth to the Potter, his Children to the Builders "To build Babylon because they have forsaken Jerusalem. "The Walls of Babylon are Souls of Men, her Gates the Groans "Of Nations, her Towers are the Miseries of once happy Families, "Her Streets are paved with Destruction, her Houses built with Death, "Her Palaces with Hell & the Grave, her Syn agogues with Torments "Of ever-hardening Despair, squar'd & polish'd with cruel skill." (Jerusalem, 24:17-35) This distinction between Jerusalem and Babylon comes from the Old Testament. There both Babylon and Egypt stand for apostasy and bondage. They stood for bondage because they stood for apostasy. Israel began as a nation in bondage in Egypt, and lapsed as a nation in bondage in Babylon. But whereas Egypt stands for voluntary bondage due to the at traction of fleshly lusts, Babylon stands for enforced bond age through worshiping false gods. The criteria for this distinction can best be explained historically. Jacob and his sons went down to dwell in Egypt at the invitation of Pharoah and Jacob's son Joseph, who had already made a high place for himself there. They went down because they were starving and there was plenty of food in Egypt. But soon both Pharoah and Joseph were dead, and the Israelites had become slaves to the Egyptians. However, even after the Jews were delivered from Egypt by Moses, the "flesh pots of Egypt" continued to be a major source of temptation, and "going down to Egypt" became synonymous with apostasy and bondage (cf. Exodus 16:3). Babylon on the other hand stands for enforced bondage because the mystery religions of Baby lon proved fatally attractive to the Israelites. Although God had commanded, "thou shalt not have any other gods before me," the Israelites repeatedly imported the Babylon ian religions because of superstitious fear of the destruc tive power of those gods. This apostasy and the consequent punishment became so frequent and perverse that Babylon soon came to be the great symbol of false religions in the Old Testament. Ultimately, God used Babylon, the very nation that had caused the apostasy, to completely destroy Jerusa lem and to carry the Children of Israel off into captivity. There is a sense, then, in Israel’s relationship with both Babylon and Egypt, in which apostasy and bondage are the same. Blake certainly considers them so in Jerusalem. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the name Rahab is used on numerous occasions in the Old Testament as a poetic name for Egypt. Therefore, although Blake identi- 79 fies Rahab primarily with Babylon, he probably also has 29 Egypt in mind. The meaning and role of Babylon and Egypt in Jerusalem is almost exactly parallel to its meaning and role in the Old Testament. The fatal attraction for Babylon and Egypt is clearly expressed by Gwendolen. When she is desperately trying to convince the rest of her evil sisters of the vir tues of the religion of feminine sexuality, she reminds them that "Egypt is as the Garden of Eden, / Babylon is our chief desire" (82:30-31). Earlier in the poem, the "Slaves" (the 29 - The Hebrew word rahabh has a variety of meanings and uses in the Old Testament. As a common noun it is frequent ly translated as "storm" or "arrogancy." In Job 26:12 and 9:13 the King James translates it as "proud" and in Isaiah 30:7 as "strength." As a proper noun it was used in both a literal and figurative sense. M. W. Jacobus (p. 760) says, "In the literal sense, it denoted a mythological sea-monster of the same class as the Dragon, and is probably connected with the Semitic myth of Tiamat, the destroyer of God's order in the universe (Job 26:12, Isaiah 51:9). In the fig urative sense, it is a name given to Egypt (Psalms 87:4, 89:10, Isaiah 30:7), possibly with reference to a mythologi cal conception of some relation between Egypt and the sea- monster Rahab (cf. Ezekiel 29:3)." The fact that the King James does not make this relationship clear argues that Blake probably knew at least some Hebrew. We now begin to see how Blake wove the web of associ ations around Rahab. In the Old Testament Rahab is the har lot of Jericho whom Blake probably associated with the fe male will, it is a'name for a mythological sea-monster of the dragon class ("a Dragon red") defeated in a primordial battle which resulted in creation, poetically it is applied to Egypt (perhaps called up because of the annual flooding of the Nile) whom God also defeated. Throughout the Bible, Egypt is associated with Babylon, and in Revelation the great Harlot is identified as the Whore of Babylon who comes riding upon a monster, and who is also defeated by God. So in choosing the name Rahab to represent State Religion, Blake is both suggesting its nature and its ultimate end. 80, children of Jerusalem in bondage in Babylon) sing the "Song of the Lamb," which describes the liberty that Jerusalem once enjoyed and the destruction of slavery she suffered as a result of running after the gods of Babylon: "Why wilt thou rend thyself apart, Jerusalem, "And build this Babylon & sacrifice in secret Groves "Among the Gods of Asia, among the fountains of pitch & nitre? "Therefore thy Mountains are become barren, Jerusalem, "Thy Valleys, Plains of burning sand; thy Rivers, waters of death; "Thy Villages die of the Famine, and thy Cities "Beg bread from house to house, lovely Jer usalem. "Why wilt thou deface thy beauty & the beauty of thy little-ones "To please thy Idols in the pretended chastities of Uncircumcision?" (Jerusalem, 60:22-30) Albion, weeping, sees Hand driving his Children "in stern accusation with cruel stripes . . . through the Streets of Babylon" (Jerusalem, 21:28-30). Hand and Hyle (the two leaders of Albion's spectrous sons) proclaim the virtues of Babylon and condemn Jerusalem in terms which suggest both the historical, Biblical situation and the way Babylon fits into Blake1s scheme in Jerusalem: "Babylon the City of Vala, the Goddess Virgin- Mother . "She is our MotherI Nature! Jerusalem is our Harlot-Sister "Return'd with Children of pollution to defile our House "With Sin and Shame. Cast, cast her into the Potter's field! "Her little-ones She must slay upon our Altars, and her aged | 81 "Parents must be carried into captivity: to redeem her Soul, "To be for a Shame & a Curse, and to be our Slaves for ever." (Jerusalem, 18:29-35) The worship of Vala ("Her name is Vala in Eternity: in Time: her name is Rahab" (Jerusalem, 70:31]) as "the Goddess Virgin-Mother," the condemnation of Jerusalem as a "Harlot" (according to the demands of the moral law), the lust for victims to slay upon their "Altars," the desire to carry Jerusalem’s "aged Parents" into "Captivity" and to make "Slaves" of her children, all remind us clearly of what we have repeatedly reiterated about established religion and its priests and kings. In short, Babylon is state religion. This relationship becomes explicit in the preface to Chapter Three. Blake says that anyone "who is the Preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion; . . . is a flatterer who means to perpetuate the Tyrant Pride & the Laws of . . . Babylon" (plate 52, prose). Later in the same chapter he says blankly that "Babylon [is] the Rational Morality" (Jerusalem, 74:32). But the role of Babylon in the Bible does not end with the Old Testament. Babylon appears again in John's vision of the apocalypse as the Whore of Babylon. And that is what Rahab turns out to be in Jerusalem. In fact, all of the epithets which Blake uses to describe Rahab come directly from the description of the Whore of Babylon in Revelation. John says, 82 And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, "Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been drunk with the wine of her fornication." So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness; and I saw a woman sit upon a scar let coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and pre cious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABY LON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OP HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration. (Revelation 17:1-6) Later, when she has been destroyed by the Lamb, we read, And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth. (Revelation 18:24) The Whore of Babylon is here accused of two sins— she has martyred the followers of Jesus, and she has fornicated with kings. Babylon in Revelation seems to stand clearly for false religion, just as it does in the Old Testament. It is false religion because it opposes the religion of Jesus and has made an unnatural alliance with the political powers. Throughout chapters seventeen and eighteen there is a clear 30 association between churches and kingdoms. The Whore of Babylon has in her hand the cup which contains all the 30 By the time Revelation was written the actual city of Babylon was in its final stages of decay, and shortly there after disappeared from history altogether. In Revelation 17 and 18, the name Babylon seems to be applied to Rome (cf. Acts 7:43 and I Peter 5:13) and it reflects the whole reli- gio-political imperial cult. evidence of her "filthiness" (i.e., "the blood of the mar tyrs of Jesus" and the semenous "wine of her fornication"). This cup in Jerusalem is identified as the "cup of Rahab," which is linked with the "twenty-seven Churches" in that it is filled with "Poisons Twenty-seven-fold" (75:3). There can be no doubt that Blake saw Rahab as a symbol of official Christianity. There can also be no doubt that he judges official Christianity for its adulterous relationship with the state and sees it as the greatest enemy of the religion of Jesus. But what is more important, finally there can be no doubt in the light of his use of Revelation 17 that he felt he was following Scripture in his condemnation of the church. He surely felt that to be a true follower of Jesus it was not only possible but necessary to condemn a church which had set up the law as a substitute for the mercy of forgiveness, which had gone whoring with the political powers, and which had set itself against those who sought to take the apocalyptic vision of Christ seriously. Blake goes on to describe Rahab as "the Abomination of Desolation, / Religion hid in War, a Dragon red & hidden Harlot." To analyze each of these epithets with the care we have given the others would be interesting but repetitious. We have, X think, made our point. Blake’s picture of estab lished religion is astoundingly comprehensive and penetrat ing. He has woven a tapestry of symbols and images with such complicated intricacy yet with such clarity that in the 84 end the church with all its priests and kings and all their abuses are revealed to us for what they are— "the Abomina tion of Desolation." The church stands out in all its grue some ugliness as the Religion of Satan and the enemy of re vealed religion. Its mysteries and martyrdoms, its perverse sexuality and its bloody wars, its subtle temptations and its oppressive tyranny, its moral judgments and its self- righteousness all stand brilliantly before us. Never again, once we have worked through Jerusalem, need we be misled by the confusion and seeming righteousness of the religion of Satan or its ministers. Rahab is revealed, and in that revelation all her fatal attractions are stripped from her. We see her in all her scaly grotesqueness like Spenser's Red Cross seeing Duessa for the first time stripped of all her concealing finery and adornment. One of these last epithets— "a hidden Harlot"— we must still consider. It evokes a metaphor so vital both in Jerusalem and in the Bible that it cannot be overlooked. Although the marriage metaphor is familiar to anyone acquainted with either Christian tradition or English liter ature, it needs to be developed here with some care. In the Old Testament the relationship between God and Israel is seen in terms of the relationship between bride and bridegroom: And I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in stedfast love, 85 and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord. (Hosea 2:19-20) The implications of this relationship are obvious. It puts demands on both members of the party. The bridegroom owes the bride love and protection; the bride owes the bridegroom faithfulness and obedience. These demands are reiterated again and again in the Old Testament. In the New Testament the metaphor and the demands re main but the members change. Now the church is the bride and Christ is the bridegroom: For I am jealous over you with a godly jealousy; for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. (2 Corinthians 11:2) That the use of the metaphor in the New Testament is de pendent on its use in the Old becomes evident from this passage in Revelation: And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . . and one of the seven angels . . . [said] "Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb's wife." (21:2, 9) The New Jerusalem has consistently been taken as a refer ence to the church. The implication is that the church now occupies the position that Israel once claimed. This dis placement of Israel by the church is more explicit in Gala tians, Chapter four, where Paul sets up two different but parallel allegorical relationships to demonstrate that the Christian no longer owes allegiance to the Jewish ceremonial law. The first is the allegory of Abraham and his wives. Abraham is God, Hagar (his concubine) is the law or Israel, and Sarah (his true wife) is grace or the church. His point is that the birthright passes, not to the children of the concubine, but to the children of the true wife. The second makes essentially the same point. Paul says that a woman who was once married to the old husband (the law), is now free to marry a new husband (Christ) since the old husband has died. Apart from the particular theological notion in these passages, Paul is obviously anxious to establish the church in the position which Israel once held. The most thorough treatment of this theme is in the Song of Solomon. In it we find a series of very sensual wedding songs which the Jews saw as establishing the rela tionship between Israel and the Lord, and the New Testament sees as the relationship between the church and Christ (cf. also Ezekiel 16 and Jeremiah 2-3). But this metaphor also has another more awesome aspect. If Israel-church is the bride of Jehovah-Christ, and if, as we have said, this relationship implies certain demands, then a breach of relationship implies certain demands, then a breach of relationship implies certain consequences and a different relationship. That is, when the bride seeks new lovers she becomes a harlot. This does in fact happen: "You have played the harlot with many lovers; and would you return to me," says the Lord. (Hosea 3:12) 87 "For the spirit of harlotry has led them astray, and they have left their God to play the harlot." (Hosea 3:12) By running after strange gods, Israel the bride has become Israel the harlot. However, the most striking use of this side of the metaphor is the book of Hosea, which is a real- life allegory of Israel's unfaithfulness and of God's love and mercy. God commands Hosea, "Go again, love a woman who is beloved of a paramour and is an adulteress; even as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods. ..." (3:1) The rest of the book develops this relationship between a merciful God and his adulterous bride, and is in direct con trast to the wholesome and happy relationship in the Song of Solomon. Just as the marriage metaphor is carried forward from the Old into the New Testament, so is the metaphor of the harlot carried forward. Paul asks, "shall I then take the members of Christ and make them the members of the harlot" (1 Cor. 6:15). It finds its most dramatic expression in the Whore of Babylon in Revelation. But in contrast to the Old Testament where Israel becomes a whore by running after strange gods, the church in the New Testament becomes a whore by espousing itself to the political orders. Therefore, Blake's whole passage turns out to be quite traditional and wholly in keeping with primitive Christian ity's interpretation of the Bible. There is little question that when Blake wrote this passage he had in mind the 88 official church, and that his judgment of that church is essentially the judgment that the Bible itself makes. In fact the main points of this whole discussion are neatly summed up in another passage from Jerusalem where the fallen Albion in confusion and unwitting self-condemnation ques tions : "What is the Wife & what is the Harlot? What is a Church & What "Is a Theatre? are they Two & not One? Can they Exist Separate? "Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion, "O Demonstrations of Reason Dividing Families in Cruelty & Pride 11 1 (57:8-11) There is one more perspective which must be shown be fore we leave this discussion of tyranny. It is necessary to show the part tyranny plays in the dramatic structure of the poem, which is extremely complex. The complexity arises largely from the fact that the poem is working on the level of microcosmic and macrocosmic image simultaneously, and from the fact that Blake does not settle on either of these to carry the weight of his dramatic movement. As we shall see in the next chapter, Albion actually exists as three separate, though related, images at the same time. He is Albion the individual, Albion the nation and Albion the cos mic giant. It is not that one image (say, Albion the indi vidual) suggests the other two by reflecting them as is so often the case in symbolic literature. If it were, we could focus on Albion the individual and let him reflect Albion the nation and Albion the cosmic giant as he could. Neither is he one image in one place and another somewhere else. He is literally all three at once, and we are invited to keep all three images simultaneously present in our minds, and to translate Albion's actions into psychological, historical and cosmological terms simultaneously. It is partly the desperation of trying to translate all of these into discur sive logical terms at the same time that discourages the reader of Jerusalem. Although the poem is called Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant Albion (and there is very good reason why it should be), there is no question at all that the central character of the poem is Albion. The movement of the poem is Albion's movement through eternal death into eternal life. To put it simply, the central drama of the poem is the fall and redemption of Albion. The central conflict of the poem is over the nature of the principle which leads to redemption or eternal life. One group in the poem claims that salvation lies in adherence to the moral law, the other group claims that salvation can only be had through the mutual forgiveness of sins. The first group is composed of Albion, the Spectre of Albion (who is Satan or the Reactor), the twelve sons of Albion, the twelve daughters of Albion, Vala, Rahab and Tirzah. This group carries the major burden of the conflict for the forces of tyranny under the moral law. They provide the law; they are the accusers of those who do not live up to its demands; they are the judges and executioners of those who have been accused, and ironically, they turn out to be the victims of their own accusations, judgments and executions (cf. Jerusalem 65). In short, they are swallowed by their own tyrannical system. But although they are forever at war with one another over petty griev ances and jealousies, as a body they are indivisibly opposed to those who believe in the forgiveness of sins. Associated with these forces of tyranny is a host of minor characters drawn from the Bible, history and mythology (both private and public), who are used sometimes to explain the nature of tyranny, sometimes to show its effects and causes, but always to expand our perspective and to put tyranny into a universal context. But perhaps the most important notion to be grasped here, is that all of these characters, no matter how small or great, are in the end all manifestations of the central character, Albion. They represent his feelings, his desires, his preoccupations, his weaknesses, his delusions and his errors. Consequently, it is quite proper (although it causes grave difficulties in reading the poem) for them to be constantly shifting, merg ing, appearing, disappearing and reappearing as the charac ter of Albion shifts, changes and develops. It is not the purpose of this study to trace all of the complex shifting relationships between the characters, but to establish clearly the nature of the central conflict in the poem, to ..................... 91 show that the resolution of the conflict is grounded prim arily on what Blake learned from the Bible, and that it is essentially in accord with what we have called primitive Christianity. The forces which oppose the tyranny of the Spectre of Albion are made up primarily of Jesus (frequently called "the Divine Vision," “the Lamb of God" and "the Savior"), Los his prophet, Jerusalem his bride, and the daughters of Beulah. These are the opponents of the moral law, the cham pions of forgiveness and the agents of Albion's redemption through forgiveness. If all of the characters in the first group are to be interpreted in terms of their relationship to Albion, all the characters in this group must be inter preted in terms of their relationship to Jesus. The two great opponents in the poem then are Albion and Jesus, and the conflict is resolved when Albion becomes one with Jesus. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see that the conflict, the alignment of forces and the resolution in Jerusalem are almost exactly the same as in the Bible. However, it is in this second group that we find the clearest statement of Blake's notion of the tradition of the poet-prophet, and it is in this group that we find the clearest analogues for primitive Christianity. To the pro phetic tradition and its relationship to primitive Chris tianity we must now turn. 92 Prophet against priest If the priestly tradition finds its most convenient symbols in Caiaphas the high priest and in Herod the king, and is centered in Jerusalem in the fallen Albion and all his manifestations; the prophetic tradition finds its most natural symbol and its progenitor in the person of Christ and is centered in Christ and his prophet Los in Jerusalem. If the binding force of the priestly tradition is tyranny under the law, the liberating force of the prophetic tradi tion is forgiveness under grace. The nature and function of forgiveness will receive major emphasis in the next chapter when I discuss the kingdom concept in Jerusalem. The nature and work of Christ I will reserve for the last chapter where I will deal with the difficult problem of the concept of God in Jerusalem. Here it will be enough to suggest briefly the stance which primitive Christianity takes toward establish- mentarianism and the law, its similarity to the stance Blake takes in Jerusalem, and how it operates in the person and work of Los the prophet of Jesus. The primitive tradition has been kept alive by its con tinual struggle to free Christianity of its entanglements with the state, to strip off the traditions and encrusta tions of official church dogma and practice, and to put Christ back into the center of its affection. Primitive Christianity has always sought to focus its affections ex clusively on Christ. It has done so partly because it saw 93 in Jesus its only protection from enslavement by established institutions. The emphasis in primitive Christianity has most often been on the liberating power of Christ— so much so that all too often it has degenerated into alb manner of excess. Under the tender influence of the Living Word (that is, the resurrected Christ), which was for it a sure guide, it could legitimately free itself from the harsh word of the 31 law. There is sufficient Biblical authority for their belief. The Evangelist Luke tells us that one of the first proclamations that Christ made when he had assumed his ministry after the temptation in the desert was a proclama- 31 . Franklin H. Littell, The Origins of Sectarian Pro testantism (New York, 1964), pp. 4-5. A case in point is the attitude of the Zwickau prophets who "... preferred the living word to the written." Littell reports that Marcus Thome (Stubner) claimed a special revelation from the Angel Gabriel (sonderliche offenbarung- und erleuchtung). 1 Finally it was declared that the Holy Scripture was unde pendable for the instruction of men. For men must be taught only by the Spirit. If God had wanted to teach men from Scripture he would have sent forth a Bible from heaven.'" Although such a view represents an excess from the point of view of almost any orthodox Church, it must be evi dent to the reader of Blake that it has certain affinities with Blake's views. The similarities become even more apparent when Littell continues, "From chiliastic, mystical and prophetic sources they drew proof that true religion de pends on inward authority and is free from external compul sion or evaluation. They went further than this. Not only the spiritual life but also the social order was to be con formed to their vision of the New Age." It is this last view, which arose out of their chiliasm and preoccupation with Davidic theocracy that led them into their abuses. And it is here that Blake would have most definitely parted company with them. Out of these notions arose the Munzter Kingdom, an attempt to establish a Davidic theocracy in preparation for the imminent return of Christ. The Munzter Kingdom was as harsh a tyranny as existed any where in Europe during the Reformation. 94 tion of liberty. It happens in the synagogue in Nazareth where he is invited to read the Haphtarah (or lesson) on the Sabbath. The scroll of Isaiah is given to him to read from, and he chooses to read from Chapter 61, verse 1: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliver ance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4:18-19) He then proclaimed, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. (Luke 4:21) The reaction of the listeners to this proclamation is almost as significant as the proclamation. They rise up, cast him out of the city and prepare to stone him. "But [Jesus] passing through the midst of them went his way" (Luke 4:30). The version of the passage which Luke here gives us comes 32 from the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. But Christ must have read from the original Hebrew and then probably translated it. The passage from Isaiah when trans lated directly from the Hebrew is even more explicit in its proclamation of liberty: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim o 9 Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (New York, 1899), Vol. I, pp. 451-452. Although this work is of some vintage, it is still one of the best studies of the life of Christ from the orthodox point of view. ......... 95 liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. . . . {Isaiah 61:1-2) Even Paul talks of ". . . the liberty which we have in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 2:4). At the end of Galatians he admonishes the Galatian Christians who are under attack from certain Jewish Christians who wish to make them conform to the demands of the Jewish ceremonial law, "Stand fast there fore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made you free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage" (5:13). In II Corinthians, in a passage which deals with the death of the law, Paul exults, "... where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (3:17). It is strange that for all of Blake's hatred of bondage there is not a great deal of talk about liberty in Jerusa lem. The word itself appears only eight times in the poem, and words like "free" or "freedom," "deliver" or "deliver ance" even less. When it does appear— except on two occa sions— it is used to bemoan its loss. This presents a tan gential but not irrelevant observation on the atmosphere which pervades Jerusalem. It is on the whole a dark poem. It is all sorrow, bondage and death. Joy, liberty and life are asserted more by their very conspicuous absence than their pervasive presence. Twice, and in almost exactly the same words we are told that "Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion" (Jerusalem 54:5). In the prose preface to the last chapter, Blake proclaims, "I know 96 of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the Liberty of both body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination ..." (Jerusalem 77, prose). Other than these we have passages like the lament of the Lairib to Jerusalem: "I gave thee liberty and life, 0 lovely Jerusalem, "And why hast thou bound me down upon the Stems of Vegetation." (60:10-11) Los laments of "a pretence of Liberty /.To destroy Liberty" (Jerusalem, 43:35-36). Even Vala laments, "Great is the cry of the Hounds of Nimrod along the Valley "OfVision, they sent the odor of War in the Valley of Vision. "All Love is lostl terror succeeds, & Hatred instead of Love, "And stern demands of Right & Duty instead of Liberty." (22:8-11) The conclusion of Jerusalem is triumphant, but there is little of the overwhelming joy we might legitimately expect. Tyranny is brought to an end, the Spectre of Albion is inni- hilated. There is no doubt that liberty has been estab lished. But the emphasis falls on the annihilation of tyranny and the end of bondage rather than on the reestab lishment of liberty. There is little doubt, however, that in Jerusalem Blake is proclaiming Jesus as the only object worthy of real af fection. The first preface is full of it. He says, "... the Ancients entrusted their love to their Writing, to the full as Enthusiastically as I have who Acknowledge mine for mv Savior and Lord" [italics editor's], or "I also hope the 97 Reader will be with me, wholly One in Jesus our Lord . . .," and again, "I pretend not to holiness: yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily as man with man, & the more to have an interest in the Friend of Sinners" (Jerusa lem 3, prose). It is Christ's love for Los and Jerusalem, and their love for him that beeps them strong and alive in the face of overwhelming opposition. And it is love which finally wins the day and effects the redemption of Albion. Jesus says to Albion, "... Wouldest thou love one who never died "For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? "And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself "Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love "As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death "In the Divine image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood." (96:23-28) Man's love for God is expressed by his love for his fellow man. This notion is clearly implied in Christ's speech to Albion, and the speech points directly to the First Epistle of John: We know that we have passed from death unto life, be cause we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. (3:14-16) . At the end of Jerusalem, Albion is for the first time filled with concern for his Divine Friend and for his Children 98 rather than for himself, and he is saved by that concern (96:29-34). Primitive Christianity also saw in Jesus the ultimate revolutionary, who had come with a new dynamic, and whose purpose was not to remodel the old order but to bring a new 33 one. By his own testimony, one does not put new wine in old wine skins. A new dynamic can only be contained by a new order. The new order differed from the old in that it was not arbitrary and external but grew naturally and spon taneously out of a new dynamic. The new dynamic was love, mercy and forgiveness. "Ye have heard it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: . . . Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you." (Matthew 5:38, 43-44) This was not the easy love born of morality and righteous ness, but a hard love which was grounded in the awareness of sin, the willingness for self-sacrifice and the joy of a new life. "Salvation" is "in the continual Forgiveness of Sins, / In the Perpetual Mutual Sacrifice in Great Eternity" (Jerusalem, 61:22-23). There are many passages in Jerusalem which give ample evidence that Blake's notion of Christ coincides remarkably 33 Such also is Blake's portrait of Jesus in The Ever lasting1 Gospel. 99 with the primitive Christian view of Jesus as leading a revolution of love. In fact directly following the passage about Rahab which I have considered above, Blake writes, But Jesus, breaking thro' the Central Zones of Death & Hell, Opens Eternity in Time & Space, triumphant in Mercy. (75:21-22) In fact, Jesus is the only successful revolutionary in Blake because he is "triumphant in Mercy." "The Glory of Chris tianity is to Conquer by Forgiveness" (Jerusalem 52, prose). Perhaps nowhere in Jerusalem is Blake's vision of Jesus more clearly or succinctly expressed than in the prefatory poem to Chapter 4: . . . "Jesus died because he strove "Against the current of this Wheel; its Name "Is Caiaphas, the dark Preacher of Death, "Of sin, of sorrow & of punishment: "Opposing Nature! It is Natural Religion; "But Jesus is the bright Preacher of Life "Creating Nature from this fiery Law "By self-denial & forgiveness of Sin. "Go therefore, cast out devils in Christ's name, "Heal thou the sick of spiritual disease, "Pity the evil, for thou art not sent ■ "To smite with terror & with punishments "Those that are sick, like the Pharisees "Crucifying & encompassing sea & land "For proselytes to tyranny & wrath; "But to the Publicans & Harlots go, "Teach them True Happiness, but let no curse "Go forth out of thy mouth to blight their peace; "For Hell is open'd to Heaven: thine eyes behold "The dungeons burst & the Prisoners set free." (77:16-35) What is perhaps most striking about this passage is that it is loaded with Biblical allusions. Almost every phrase could be traced back to the Scriptures. To search them out 100 at the moment, however, would lead us from our main purpose. It will be more useful to point out the main points of its message. First, there is a clear insistence on Christ's ethic of love and life, joy and forgiveness, which stands in direct contrast to the ethic of "'Caiaphas, the dark Preacher of Death, / Of sin, of sorrow & of punishment.1" Second, it is a message of liberty and freedom ("'The dun geons burst & the Prisoners set free.'") which stands in contrast to the message of enslavement by "'the Pharisees / Crucifying & encompassing sea & land / For proselytes to tyranny & wrath,'" Third, there is the basic assumption that the religious initiates are incapable of accepting the ethic of Jesus because they will not acknowledge their need, and it is only those who are considered unworthy of partici pation in establishment religion who find a place with Jesus because they cannot ignore their need. Put simply it is this: there is no hope for the harlot who pretends to be a saint. If we turn again to Blake's own moving confession in the prose preface to the first chapter of Jerusalem, we see the point clearly: The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sin: he who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviour's kingdom, the Divine Body, will never enter there. I am perhaps the most sinful of men. I pretend not to holiness: yet I pretend to love, to see, to con verse with daily as man to man, & the more to have an interest in the Friend of Sinners. (Plate 3, prose) But if Jesus offers hope to the publican, he has little patience with the Pharisee or with the religio-political establishment for which he stands. If we are to take the Gospels at face value, and believe the judgment of Jesus, as both Blake and primitive Christianity do, we must conclude that the Jewish establishment of the first century was in a state of decay. It was concerned (and particularly the Pharisaical party was concerned) first with an intricate legal system which would advance its own cause by strengen- ing its hold on the people; and second, with throwing off the yoke of Roman oppression. The Jewish people of that time were burdened with an oppressive Roman occupationary army, a debauched and corrupt Tetrarch, and a set of subtle, self-interested religious leaders, who played Herod against Pilot to gain control for themselves. Even among these leaders there was constant maneuvering for power and for the hearts of the people. It was Sadducee against Priest and both against Pharisee. Each had his position of strength. For the Priest and the Sadducee it was the Temple and the Mosaic law. For the Pharisee it was the synagogue and the Talmud or oral law. Their scribes haggled endlessly over fine points of law and theology, robbing Judaism of its covenental spirit and reducing it to a religion for the scrupulous.34 Jesus denounced them and their ambitions. He called them "a generation of vipers," "whited sepulchres," "empty 34Jacobus, pp. 701-703, 728-737, 798. I 102: cisterns." When they challenged him to debate on trivial points of law, he responded by challenging their basic assumptions. When they saw his mass support and tried to enlist his support, he answered them by violating their intricate ordinances. In the end it became clear that Jesus and the Pharisees could not co-exist. It was his life or theirs, and so they crucified him. Ironically, however, their victory was their defeat, and Christ's death on the cross made it possible to reject them. As Blake says in his annotations to Watson, Wherefore did Christ come? Was it not to abolish the Jewish Imposture? Was not Christ murder'd because he taught that God loved all Men & was their father . . .? (K. 387) God loves all men and not only those who claim to be worthy of the love of God like the Pharisees and Sadducees. At the end of Jerusalem when the Spectre is revealed as the Anti christ, he is revealed partly as the Jewish establishment: Tho' divided by the Cross & Kails & Thorns & Spear In cruelties of Rahab & Tirzah, permanent endure A terrible in definite Hermaphroditic form, A Wine-press of Love & Wrath, double, Hermaphroditic, Twelvefold in Allegoric pomp, in selfish holiness: The Pharisaion, the Grammateis, the Pres- buterion, The Archiereus, the Iereus, the Saddusaion: double Each withoutside of the other, covering eastern heaven. Thus was the Covering Cherub reveal'd, majestic image Of Selfhood, Body put off, the Antichrist accursed Cover'd with precious stones: a Human Dragon terrible And bright strech'd over Europe & Asia gorgeous. In three nights he devoured the rejected corse of death. (89:1-13) The list of characters in lines six and seven are translit erations of the Greek names for the Pharisees, Scribes, Sanhedrin, High Priest, Priest, and Sadducees. The "Cross & Nails & Thorns & Spear" in line one are of course an allu sion to the Crucifixion. The devouring of the "rejected corse of death" in "three nights" (line 13) is a reference to the resurrection, and suggests that because of the resur rection the Antichrist and his Jewish establishment was left only with their own death for all the pains they took to insure the death of Christ in the Crucifixion. The aboli tion of the "Jewish Imposture" was a direct consequence of Christ's death. Blake's attitude to establishment, institutionalized Christianity, is similar to the attitude Christ took to establishment, institutionalized Jewry. Christ's attack on the Pharisees and Priests in first-century Israel is essen tially the same as Blake’s attack on the priests and clergy in eighteenth-century England. If Blake went farther than Jesus in hating the law, he was no more violent than Jesus in his attack on legalism. What both Jesus and Blake hated more than anything else was a confidence in the law as a 104 means to salvation. Both saw that the law not properly understood would lead not to self-knowledge but to self- 35 righteousness and death. In each case the violence with which they attacked the law was occasioned by an intricate system of legal qualifications which were intended to main tain those who had established the laws. In the lyric which forms part of the preface to Chapter 3, Blake writes, When Satan first the black bow bent And the Moral Law from the Gospel rent, He forg'd the Law into a Sword And spill'd the blood of mercy's Lord. (52:17-20) in the prologue to The Gates of Paradise (which was first engraved in 1793 and to which additions were made in 1818 about the time that Blake was finishing Jerusalem) Blake says something which helps to explain the verse from the lyric. He says, Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice, Such are the Gates of Paradise. Against the Accuser's chief desire, Who walk'd among the Stones of Fire, Jehovah's fingers Wrote the Law: Then Wept! then rose in Zeal & Awe, And in the midst of Sinai's heat Hid it beneath the Mercy Seat. [And the Dead Corpse from Sinai's heat Buried beneath his Mercy Seat.— later version] 0 Christians, Christians! tell me Why You rear it on your Altars high. (K. 761) 35 Cf. Christ's parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, Luke 18:9-14. 105 The "Gospel" in the first passage is synonymous with the "Mercy Seat" in the second. The law has a place when it is accompanied by the gospel or shadowed by the mercy seat. In fact, when it is held in this relationship it becomes the law of life or, as James puts it, "the law of liberty" (James 1:25). But when the law is "rent" from the gospel, or reared high on the altar rather than buried beneath the mercy seat, it becomes the law of death and the "yoke of bondage." It is then that the law becomes a "sword" and is used to kill mercy or "mercy's Lord.” When the law is reared above the mercy seat it becomes a curse, and the irony is that "he who makes his law a curse, / By his own law shall surely die" (Jerusalem, 27:81-84). We shall see later that the provision of forgiveness which is the basis of salvation comes to man as a conse quence of the death of Christ. Because he has forgiven us, we may forgive ourselves and one another. The price of for giveness is death— the death of the selfhood after the example of the willing gift of Christ's own person. The chief agent of this message of forgiveness to fallen human ity (or in Jerusalem to the fallen Albion), is Los. He alone of all the characters in Jerusalem maintains a rela tionship with the Divine Vision— Jesus— which allows him to perceive and proclaim the gospel of forgiveness. As such he is Christ's representative to man and fulfills the function of the Biblical prophet. It is not surprising that he is 106 called the "Eternal Prophet" (Jerusalem, 75:6), and is clearly associated with the Biblical prophetic tradition: And feeling the damps of death, they [the Divine Family] with one accord delegated Los Conjuring him by the Highest that he should Watch over them Till Jesus shall appear; & they gave their power to Los Naming him the Spirit of Prophecy, calling him Elijah. (44:28-31) The prophetic tradition is fairly well defined in both the Old and the New Testaments. A prophet was not primarily a foreteller, although the New Testament came to see him partly as that and claims that many of the prophecies of the Old Testament point directly to Christ. His major function was that of forthteller— as the voice of God to an apostate nation. The names given to the prophet in the Old Testament are significant and help us to understand the function of the prophet in Jerusalem. He was called a ro1 eh, a hozeh, — — 36 or a nabhi1 . The first two come from synonymous roots which mean "to see." Thus the exact translation of ro1 eh and hozeh, which are translated "prophet" in the King James, is "seer." The prophet is first of all one whose sight pierces through the veil which shrouds divine things and is identical with Blake’s man of vision. There can be little doubt that, in Jerusalem, no one deserves the title of visionary— and consequently of prophet— more than Los. He 36 Jacobus, p. 739. 107: perceives the Divine Vision— the Savior, Jesus— from the very beginning, and his clarity of vision stands in direct contrast to the blindness and delusions of the fallen Albion and all his spectrous hosts. The third name, nabhi, comes from the root, nabu, "to announce," "to speak" or "to proclaim" {cf. Exodus 4:16, 7:1). The prophet then is not only the "seer" but also the "voice" in the world which proclaims the vision. It is not that he claims to know mysteries; his business is to pro claim revelations. And for Blake revelation or vision, as we have pointed out, suggests that which can be seen rather than that which cannot. Blake's definition of the prophet in his annotations to Watson's Apolocrv accords remarkably with this Old Testament view of the prophet. He says, Prophets, in the modern sense of the word, have never existed. Jonah was no prophet in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing will happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dic tator. It is man's fault if God is not able to do him good, for he gives to the just & to the unjust, but the unjust reject his gift. (K. 392) For Blake as for the Old Testament the prophet is both a seer and a proclaimer. But if the proclamatory role of the prophet is depend ent on his role as visionary, it implies a responsibility to those who are without vision. In the Old Testament, God appointed prophets because the covenant of Jehovah had been 108 perverted. Because the law had become an end in itself, be cause ritual had been emptied of Spirit, there arose in Israel the prophet to correct the people. If there is one theme which runs consistently through all of Old Testament prophecy, it is the proclamation of the uselessness, even destructiveness of the outward observance of religious rit ual under the law if it is not accompanied by the true spirit of worship (cf. Isaiah 1). There was also a curious double character to the pro phets. At times they appear as rugged men proclaiming the destruction of an apostate nation, but at other times, when God had punished, there was a deep tenderness and solicita tion for the punished. The number of occasions on which prophets interceded for a nation tormented by the wrath of a holy God are legion. But above all, there was in many of the prophets the yearning for the advent of the promised redeemer (cf. Acts 7). It is not impossible not to notice how close this description of the prophetic character runs to the character of Los (and incidentally to Blake himself, who frequently seems to identify with Los) as revealed in Jerusalem. Los thunders against Satan, against the sons and daughters of Albion and their triple goddess— Vala, Terzah and Rahab— and against his own spectrous reason. At other times he weeps for the fallen Albion and the destruction of Jerusalem, and always looks confidently and expectantly for the coming of the Lamb of God. In this respect Los most ................................109: resembles John the Baptist, the first prophet in the New Testament, whose task was explicitly to prepare the way for the coming of the Lamb. In a very real sense then, the prophets were, like Christ, revolutionaries. Their task was to deny the estab lished order, to denounce tyranny and to lead the captives to freedom. Their message was characterized by wrath and pity, and in Jerusalem it is Rinthra and palamaboron, sons of Los, who represent these qualities in the "Eternal Pro phet." In their role as revolutionaries, the prophets were in turn denied by the establishment and sometimes hunted and destroyed (cf. Acts 7:51-52). The most obvious example of this is seen in the death of John the Baptist at the hand of Herod. It is to these prophets that Jesus again and again traces himself, because it was these prophets who kept the vision of Jesus clear and inviolate when the priests and 37 their people corrupted it. The prophet then also had a responsibility to his vision. He was the guardian or keeper of the vision. "Therefore the Sons of Eden praise Urthona's Spectre [Los] in songs, /Because he kept the Divine vision in time of trouble" (Jerusalem, 95:19-20). And at the end 37 Stephen's sermon to his persecutors in Acts 7 is a very clear statement of the notion which has prevailed in Christianity that throughout their history the Jews have re peatedly opposed their prophets and that their opposition to Jesus is in keeping with their traditional opposition to the prophetic voice. 110: of Jerusalem after Albion has been redeemed he wonders "at the Divine Mercy & at Los's sublime honour" (96:32), for he announces to Jesus, "’I see thee in the likeness & simili tude of Los my Friend'" (96:22). There are two points that I must make in conclusion. Mark Schorer says at one point in his discussion on Jerusalem, It was precisely Milton's Christianity that Blake was intent on improving, yet apparently he lacked the histor ical sense necessary to understand that Milton had al ready gone as far with the antiauthoritarian position as it is possible to go without undermining completely the most serious claims of religion. Blake determined to abolish authority, took the additional step. Like many more representative men in the eighteenth century, he took it because he loved man more dearly than he loved God.38 Exactly what Schorer means by "the most serious claims of religion" he never says. I assume, however, from the con text that he has in mind the doctrine of the nature of God. To that doctrine I will come in the last chapter. Here, however, it must be said that it would seem to me that Blake's antiauthoritarianism is founded on a rather tradi tional notion of the nature of God if we accept the primi tive Christian rather than the official church view of the nature of God. It is natural that an authoritarian church would tend to seek out the authoritarian God of the Old Testament and the Pauline Epistles. The primitive Christian Q Q William Blake: The Politics of Vision (New York, 1946), p, 361............ Ill tradition, however, sought for their vision of the nature of God in the person of Jesus, whose message is first of all liberty and forgiveness through a regenerative death. Blake's antiestablishmentarianism I have shown to be thor oughly grounded in the Bible, and I have shown that his reading of the Bible, in Jerusalem is consistent with at least one Christian tradition. Secondly, it is not my intention to claim that Blake’s antiestablishment sentiments stem exclusively from his grounding in the primitive Christian tradition, or that he belonged to the tradition in any formal way. Although the similarity of his Christianity to primitive Christianity adequately explains his antiauthoritarianism, there were doubtless other factors which contributed to his revolution ary thinking. Northrop Frye has clearly shown that there is a tradition of revolutionary resistance that borders on 39 anarchism which is uniquely English. He has also pointed again to the quite obvious revolutionary and anarchist ten dencies of nineteenth-century English Romanticism. He is 40 quite right that Blake shares in both of these. Besides his highest devotion to his vision of Jesus, Blake was first and foremost an Englishman. And although Blake formed his creative habits in the age that preceded Romanticism proper, 3 9 "Blake after Two Centuries," p. 148. Blake after Two Centuries," pp. 146-149. 112 it is obvious that he had much more affinity with the Roman tics than with the writers of the preceding age. Recogniz ing these ancillary influences does no violence to my thesis. I do claim, however, that his antiestablishraent commitments do not cut him off from Christianity, but rather cast him squarely into the tradition of Christianity as we have defined it. This is true even though his sentiments are directed mainly at the official church. Even if it can not be adequately demonstrated that Blake had any active affiliation with any of the radical sects of his time, it seems clear from my argument that he could have and most likely did get all of these views from the Bible itself, which is where the primitive tradition also got its views. It also seems to me that this study of Blake's anti establishment arianism and its probable derivation from the Bible has demonstrated that Blake scholarship needs to de vote more of its energies to a careful reading of the Bible and to the study of its influence on Blake. It should be immediately apparent that none of the attempts to search out Blake's influences in the more esoteric traditions have been or will be nearly as fruitful as a careful comparison of his works with the Bible. CHAPTER II THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD The Eible as Redemptive History Traditional Christian interpretation has almost always accepted the view that the history of the Jews is the his-^ tory of man’s redemption. This is implicit in I Corinthi ans, chapter 15, where Paul says, For since by man came death, by man came also the resur rection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. (vs, 21r-22) The care with which Old Testament Israel traces itself back to the first man, Adam, together with the care with which the New Testament traces the lineage of Jesus back through Israel, suggests that we are to read the history of the Children of Israel, from Adam to Christ, as the history of man1s redemption. The view is also supported by the conventional prac tice, both in the New Testament and in church tradition, of seeing many of the heroes of the Old Testament as types of Christ. Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua: and the prophets Jonah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and many others to a greater or lesser degree, in person or in act, are seen as parallel to the person and act of Christ. 113 Noah's flood is seen as a type of Christian baptism, and Noah's ark as a type of Christ's salvation of the faithful and damnation of the faithless. Abraham's willingness to offer up his son, Isaac, is seen as a type of God offering up his son, Jesus. Joseph was sold into Egypt, just as Jesus was sold to the priests and the Pharisees. Moses led the Children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt, and Joshua, whose name is etymologically the same as Jesus', led the people into Canaan, the Promised Land, just as Jesus leads his people out of the bondage of sin and into the New Jeru salem, the heavenly promised land. And Jonah's three days and three nights in the belly of a whale are interpreted as a type of Christ's three days in the tomb. Many of the situations and incidents of the Old Testament also have been translated as types of Christ or of the Christian life — the passover, the manna, the water out of rock, the ser pent lifted up, the wandering in the wilderness, and the crossing of the Jordan. Perhaps the most explicit example of the notion that the history of Israel as presented in the Old Testament is more than a haphazard collection of historical and poetical documents gathered by chance and unified only by their com mon subject, the Jews, is found in I Corinthians: And so it is written, "The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." (15:45) 115 There is here, first of all, an appeal to the authority of scripture itself. (The first part of the quotation is taken from Genesis.) This appeal implies that Paul views the old Testament as something more than a mere historical record like the record of the Romans or Egyptians or any other people. But what is more important, the quotation itself implies that the two central events in Jewish his tory are the creation of man and the redemption of man. That Paul should name the man of redemption, Adam, after the first created man, suggests that he sees some direct and essential relationship between them. Exactly what this view of history is, we shall establish later. Here it is enough to suggest that it implies that the history of the Jews is not to be viewed in temporal terms as political or social history, but in the light of its eternal signifi cance— that is, as the history of redemption. If the history of the Jews is the history of redemp tion, it is not of the redemption of the Jews alone. The New Testament is adamant in its assertion that the fall of Adam was the fall of all mankind. At the time of the fall, God made a promise to our first parents that he would ulti mately redeem them.^ And since Adam is the father of not ^Genesis 3:15— "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel."— has often been interpreted as a messianic prophecy. Under such an inter pretation it would refer directly to Christ's victory over 1X6 only the Jews, but of all mankind, the promise of redemp tion was not for the Jews alone, but for all mankind. Even when the promise was renewed to Abraham, who is the father of the Jews, its universality was strongly emphasized. God said: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make they name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: And in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 12:2-3 [italics mine]) Satan on the cross. This interpretation is based on a thoroughgoing Christo-centric approach to the Old Testament. The Christian Church— almost every brand of Christian Church, and primitive Christianity in particular— has al ways been disposed to read the Old Testament in this way. There is a good deal of evidence in the New Testament that both Jesus and his followers were also disposed to read the Old Testament in the light of the new insights made pos sible by the person and work of Jesus. There are numerous occasions on which Jesus claims that he is the fulfillment of one or another Old Testament prophecy. (Matthew 1:22, 2:15, 2:17, 12:17, 26:54; Mark 1:15, 14:49; Luke 4:21, 21: 24, 27:35; John 12:38, 17:12, 19:24; Act 1:16; James 2?23 are only a few of the numerous occasions on which Jesus or one of his followers makes this point.) There is also a good deal of evidence that much of the Old Testament (.for example, the covenant) is reinterpreted in the New Testae raent, because the perception of Old Testament events is al tered by the light cast on them by the revelation of the Word. . It can be safely assumed that Blake took the same her- menutical approach. In the preface to Chapter One of Jeru salem, Blake says, "I also hope the God' o£ Fire and Lord of Love to whom the Ancients look'd and saw his day afar off, with trembling & amazement" ([italics the editor's] K.621). Since this passage is almost certainly an allusion to He brews 11:13, it is likely that by "Ancients" Blake here means the Old Testament prophets, and "the Lord ojE Love1 1 is a reference to Jesus. Blake also saw Jesus as the fulfill ment of the Old Testament and thus the principle by which it should be interpreted. Cf. fn. 2. 117 That the Jews were a special people must be accepted without doubt, but the notion that they were special by virtue of any special holiness or faithfulness is immedi ately dispelled by even a superficial reading of the Bible. In fact the theological history of Old Testament Judaism is a perpetual cycle of apostasy, punishment, repentance and restoration. It is precisely their conventionality that is emphasized and that makes them useful to the purposes of God's redemptive plan. That is, because they are ordinary, their responses and reactions to God's redemption are typi cal of the responses and reactions of ordinary men. Once again, even the specific experiences that the Jews encoun-' ter in their growth and death as a nation is typical. Just as God promised a messiah to the Jews, so he promised a messiah to all men. Just as the family of Israel descended into Egypt and fell into bondage, so the family of men has fallen into the bondage of sin. Even as the Jews were de livered from Egypt and ushered into the promised land by Joshua, so mankind is delivered from the bondage of sin and ushered into the spiritual promised land by Jesus. This promised land is the New Jerusalem, the apocalyptic Kingdom of God which John saw in his vision on Patmos, and which shall come at the end of time when heaven and earth are swept away, and God shall create a New Heaven and a New Earth (Revelation 21) . With the death and resurrection of Christ at the end 118 of the Gospels, the church of Christ takes the place of Israel in redemptive history. Although Israel remains in the New Testament as a metaphor, it largely disappears as a physical entity. One very obvious reason for this disap pearance is the fact that soon after the death of Christ, Rome completely destroyed Jerusalem, and the Jews were dis persed through the whole world. That is, what was left of Israel after the Babylonian captivity literally ceased to exist as a nation until the founding of Israel as a nation state in 1948. There are of course other reasons for Is rael 1s disappearance which are more closely related to our present discussion, and which we shall come to later. How ever, at the end of time, when history sweeps into eternity in the apocalypse, it is only right that Israel should once again take its place at the center of God's redemptive plan as the type of the redemption of all mankind. This must ! happen, or the pattern of the Bible would be incomplete and' untrue. So before the parousia, Israel must be gathered from its dispersion, and when the New Jerusalem has come, the 144,000 faithful— 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes of Israel— will enter in. The entry of the faithful of Israel into the New Jerusalem will be the entry of all the faithful of God.2 In fact, the history of Israel is typical 2Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 371, makes much the same point. He says, "Jesus came to clear up an ambi-r 119 on two levels— the individual and the universal. Just as each person sins, is redeemed in Jesus Christ and looks forward to consummation with him at the time of death, so the whole world fell in Adam, is redeemed in Jesus Christ, and looks forward to a consummation with him at the time of his second coming. The history of the Children of Israel, therefore, is both macrocosm and microcosm. Although both primitive and official Christianity have habitually seen Hebrew history as typical, they clash over the nature of the Kingdom of God. The strong emphasis on the inner spirit leads primitive Christianity to see the Kingdom of God as spiritual3— while the preoccupation with guity in the Old Testament conception of 'Israel' as the larger human and divine body in whom all Israelites live. On the one hand there is the conception of it as a chosen race, a peculiar people, and exclusive ceremonial code, a secure possession of a little patch of ground in the physic ; cal world. This is the legal and historical conception of Israel, the Judaism which rejects the Gospel. On the other : hand there is the imaginative or poetic conception of it as a spiritual Israel, the total human form of the awakened imagination of man. This is what the Apocalypse means when it speaks of the sealing of the 144,000 'servants of God* who are equally divided among the twelve tribes of Israel. This conception of the whole 'redeemed' humanity as a spir itual Israel is the starting point of Blake's conception of Israel." 3Friedman, pp. 108, 115. In his attempt to recon struct the early Anabaptist teachings on the doctrine of the two worlds (and it should be remembered that early Ana- baptism was at the center of the primitive Christian tradir- tion) Mr. Friedman says, "Most important in this conception [i.e., of the two worlds] is the idea that the 'other king dom' [i.e., the Kingdom of God] is not merely something transcendental, something of another aeon, or something to be expected and experienced only after death, but a reality ; 120 the body politic in official Christianity predisposes it to see the Kingdom of God as the reign of the church in this c . world. We shall explore these contrasting views of the Kingdom in some detail later, but first it is necessary to see how Blake uses the Bible in Jerusalem, and how his use of it suggests that he accepted the notion that Bible his^- tory is redemptive history. The Israelites and the English: A Chosen People Although Blake's use of the Bible is not slavish, there is at times an almost exact correspondence between many situations in his poem and in the Bible. We have in Jerusalem a detailed account of the division of the land among the twelve tribes of Israel (16:34-60). There is reference to the giving of the law (16:68), to the wander ing in the wilderness (62:25-29, 86:26), to the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud (86:27), to the crossing over Jordan into the promised land (34:42-36:24), to the contin- to be expected and experienced in this life, even though in a sort of metahistorical situation. . . . They [i.e., the Anabaptists] felt absolutely certain that they were citi zens of that other (spiritual) world here and now, and ac cepted the values, the outlook on history and the social consequences which follow with this position as a matter of course." Therefore, by "spiritual" I do not mean that the king dom had no existence in reality for primitive Christianity. For although it existed in the world, it was not of the world. It was a kingdom of a different type, controlled by spiritual values and directed toward spiritual ends. 121 uous conflict between the tribes and their Canaanitish neighbors (54:26), to the continual cycle of apostasy, pun ishment and repentance, to the division of the land into north and south— Israel and Judah (63:12), to the destruc tion of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (78:31-80:10), to the captivity and to the dispersion of the Jews (84:13-16). Literally hundreds of Biblical characters and place names, especially from the Old Testament, are to be found in Jeru salem. Blake undoubtedly takes liberties with the Bible, yet almost without exception, the allusions carry with them their Biblical associations, and their role in the poem cannot be fully understood until their role in the Bible becomes clear. It is no exaggeration to say that a great deal of the obscurity which surrounds Blake's major prophet cies is due to and ignorance of the details of the Biblical narrative, Blake's knowledge of the Bible was thorough and; specific.4 Even a cursory check reveals that there is con fidence and consistency in the way he uses even the minutest details. It is strange that so many Blake critics have ^Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 357, says, "In a letter dated January 30, 1803, Blake speaks of learning the Hebrew alphabet, and he must obviously have got much further in the language before beginning Jerusalem, as that poem, for better or worse, shows, in its treatment of the Bible, the sudden access of significance in detail which always takes place when one turns from a translation to its original." The letter he refers to is the one to James Blake (K. 819-r 822) . 122 ! } i avoided this most obvious of sources and have sought in- | stead in the occult and esoteric for his origins. Northrop ; Frye hits the mark when he says, j i Blake . . . was brought up on the Bible . . . [and] is unusually close to this simple and naive Biblism even for an English poet. The occult and esoteric elements ; in his thought have been grossly exaggerated by critics who, as Johnson said of Hume, have not read the New Testament with attention. What is so obviously true of most of his paintings is true also of his poetry: it is the work of a man whose Bible was his textbook.^ ! But even though we follow the thousands of minute Biblical threads which weave their way through the poem to their ul- : timate source, we do not feel that easy familiarity with them that Blake must have had. It is not only that we find j I it difficult to order and remember the infinite number of | i Biblical allusions, we also cannot respond to them emotion- J ally with the same ease with which we respond to the more j i familiar Greco-Roman mythologies. j i However, Blake does not use the Bible merely as a source-book for allusions. His use of it is far from orna mental. Nor does he pick and choose among the stories of i the Bible for situations that complement or support his no tions in the way that T. S. Eliot uses classical literature. | The whole pattern and structure of the Bible is present in Jerusalem. In fact the pattern of the Bible carries the ; major burden of the structure of the poem. Frye points out that: 5"Blake after Two Centuries,1 * p. 146. 123 The imaginative vision of human life sees it as a drama in four acts: a fall, the struggle of men in a fallen world which is what we usually think of as history, the world's redemption by a divine man in which eternal life and death achieve a simultaneous triumph, and an apoca lypse. These four acts correspond to the four parts of Jerusalem.6 Frye makes it abundantly clear that the drama in four acts which he presents here is exactly parallel to the drama of the Bible. In other words, Frye is suggesting that the structure of Jerusalem is the structure of the Bible be cause the four chapters correspond to the four acts of the redemptive drama. As it turns out, there is no simple one- to-one relationship between the four acts of the redemptive drama in the Bible and the four chapters of Jerusalem. Al- t though the fall does occur in the beginning of Jerusalem and the apocalypse at the end, just as they do in the Bible, in between there is not the clear and consistent progress from fall to apocalypse that is found in the Bible. Frye has I think been misled by the very neat division of Jeru salem into four chapters and has fallen prey to the tempta tion to make an easy identification between them and what he has called the "four acts" of the redemptive drama. But he is certainly right that the structure of the Bible does underlie the structure of Jerusalem. And to understand Blake's use of Biblical material in Jerusalem, one must un derstand its place in the whole scheme of redemptive his- ^Fearful Symmetry, p. 351. 124 tory as presented in the Bible. Simply to determine its immediate context is not enough.^ However, besides Blake's preoccupation, in Jerusalem, with the spiritual history of mankind in general, he shows a more provincial interest in the spiritual history of Eng land. We shall soon see that Blake is strictly orthodox in his view that the history of Israel is parallel to the his tory of mankind, but we must point out here that he is something less than orthodox in his view that it is also actually parallel to the history of England. Blake does ^For the various attempts to deduce the structure of Jerusalem cf. Appendix I. Frye's identification of the structure of Jerusalem is obviously not as accidental as I have perhaps made it seem. It Is this study of Blake that led him to the conception, which he later developed fully in Anatomy of Criticism, that the four^-part myth is the basis of all literature. It leads of course to his four seasonal symbols and the four main genres: autumn: fall: tragedy, winter: fallen world: satire, spring: rebirth: romantic comedy, summer: life: romance and epic. I am sug gesting, however, that no neat parallel can be drawn be tween any one of the acts in Frye's drama and any one of the chapters in Blake's poem. ^Schorer, pp. 103-104, comments on Blake's use of Anglo-Israelism. He says, "An excellent example of the pre cision with which Blake translated the literal into the metaphorical is his use of the theory of Anglo-Israelism, propounded over thirty years by the fanatic Richard Brotht- . ers. The theory.... is of the origins of the British people in the ten tribes of Israel, and it enjoyed then, as it again does now, a considerable vogue. To Blake it was an unusually useful concept for his central idea of the universality of human experience, for relating national with Biblical affairs, for further elaborating his metaphor of the disintegration of life, and for underscoring his democratic notion that the individual, like society, is ca- , pable of peaceful equality." Cf. also Frye, Fearful Sym metry , p. 373. 125 in fact make an almost exact identification between both the history and the geography of the two countries. The English become the twelve tribes of Israel— the chosen peo ple (Jerusalem 16:28-60), London becomes Jerusalem (29:19), Albion becomes Canaan (63:42, 71:1), the Thames becomes the Jordan (79:33-35), and Salisbury becomes the valley of the son of Hinnom (53:17 and 29). Blake makes no effort to dis tinguish the mythological, historical, contemporary and purely imaginary characters of Britain, and the characters of the Bible. Gonorill and Ragan, Bacon and Locke, Hand and Hyle, Los and Vala, Reuben and Rahab all operate to gether without discomfort and without the least regard to origin. This identification between England and Israel is per haps nowhere more clearly or beautifully stated than in the prefatory poem to Milton, which has sometimes been called "Jerusalem." And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire. I will not cease from Mental Fightf Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green & pleasant Land, "Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets,1 1 Numbers, xi, ch., 29 y, (Milton f plate 1) There are three ideas operating in this poem which are imme-i diately relevant. First, Blake is looking back to a time when England was characterized by a state of innocence, life and spiritual wholeness, a state which he calls "Jeru salem," but which England has since lost, and for which Blake resolves to fight and build until it return. But if Jerusalem is a state, it is also a city, the capital of Israel. And Blake is asking, "was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic Mills?" The Satanic Mills, which in Jerusalem are situated in the wilderness outside of Gol- gonooza, the city of Art (13:49, 39:3) play a significant role in all of Blake's Major Prophecies. They are an image which came out of Blake’s hatred for the Industrial Revolu tion and are used by the enemies of Israel to oppress the English (13:57), (The two ideas, Israel and England, are so intricately mingled throughout Jerusalem that it is dif ficult to establish the relationship without assuming it.) In Jerusalem 43:49, for instance, the English are ground in the Mills to make bread for Hand and Scofield (sons of Al bion) ; and in 60:59 Jerusalem is deluded by "the turning mills.1 1 There is, in fact, a whole set of very complex ideas surrounding the Satanic Mills which is not relevant here.® More important is the fact that in his references to the Satanic Mills Blake has in mind the great industrial centers of England like Manchester and Liverpool. And it is where these ruinous English mills now stand that Jerusa lem was once "builded.1 1 Finally, it is only natural that Blake should place the sphere of Christ's ministry where Jerusalem is, in England: "And was the holy Lamb of God / On England's pleasant pastures seen?" In Jerusalem, Engr land has taken the place of the Holy Land. In the 27th plate of Jerusalem there is another lyric which is reminiscent of the one prefacing Milton, If it is less inspired poetically, it is even more explicit in its identification of Albion with Jerusalem. If before he only asked the question, now he asserts it confidently: The fields from Islington to Marybone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood, Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalem's pillars stood. Her Little-ones ran on the fields, The Lamb of God among them seen, And fair Jerusalem his Bride, Among the little meadows green. ®At this point it is worth remembering that in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the "Angel" conducts the ' ‘ Devil" on a journey into the "Mill" through the "Church" (plate 17). This observation supports very nicely what was said in the last chapter of Blake's attitude to the Church. 128 Pancrass & Kentish-town repose Among her golden pillars high, Among her golden arches which Shine upon thie starry sky. She walks upon our meadows green, The Lamb of God walks by her side And every English Child is seen Children of Jesus & his Bride. (1-20) The poem goes on to describe the fall of Albion and the separation of his Satanic Spectre, whose first act is to destroy Jerusalem. Again the event takes place in England: Jerusalem fell from Lambeth's Vale Down thro' Poplar & Old Bow, Thro' Malden & acros [sic] the Sea, In War & howling, death & woe. (41-44) If this identification did not lie at the very heart of the poem, it might be no more vital than an interesting reflection of the well established English poetic conven tion of domesticating both Trojan and Hebraic material which began in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of England and was carried on in such histories as Warren's Albion's England, Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's His tory of Britain. For Blake as for Milton, Albion, like Israel, was "the sacred community . . . marvellously chosen ; to be the herald of salvation for the human race."^ The full title of our poem is after all Jerusalem: the Emanar- . 10Fearful Symmetry, p. 123. 129 tion of the Giant Albion.^ Something of the awe and joy which Blake felt over this relationship is reflected in the prose preface to Chapter 2; Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion! Can it be? Is it a Truth that the Learned have explored? Was Brit ain the Primitive Seat of the Patriarchal Religion? If it is true, my title-page is also True, that Jerusalem was & is the Emanation of the Giant Albion. It is True and cannot be controverted. (Jerusalem 27, prose) But if the history of Albion becomes the history of Israel, as it does in Jerusalem, it also becomes the his tory of mankind. If the geography of England has become the geography of Israel, it now becomes the geography of the world. Jerusalem says, London cover'd the whole Earth: England encompass'd the Nations, And all the Nations of the Earth were seen in the cities of Albion. (79:22-23) If the fall and destruction of Jerusalem was the fall and destruction of Albion, we now find that "Jerusalem's Ruins . . . overspread the whole Earth" (Jerusalem 54:13-14). H-A fine recent study of the relationship between Al bion and Jerusalem in English Literature is Harold Pisch's book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seven teenth^ Century Literature (London, 1964). Although thework is more useful for the study of Milton and his contempora ries, it provides a fine background for the study of Jeru salem. In fact, although Mr. Pisch treats Jerusalem only incidentally, he begins and ends his study with an applica tion of his thesis to Blake . Mr. Fisch is obviously well informed on both seventeenth-century literature and the Old Testament tradition, but the fact that he tends to slight the contributions of the New Testament to the concept of Jerusalem lessens the final usefulness of the study. 130 In the lyric from the twenty-seventh plate of Jerusalem, which we have given in part above, the fall of Jerusalem which is the fall of Albion is also the fall of Europe, Asia, and of the whole world: The Rhine was red with human blood, The Danube roll'd a purple tide, On the Euphrates Satan stood, And over Asia stretch'd his pride. He wither'd up sweet Zion's Hill From every Nation of the Earth; He wither'd up Jerusalem's Gates, And in a dark Land gave her birth. (54-52) In fact, the sense of universal destruction which pervades Jerusalem is one of its most awesome qualities, and the la ment of the Voice Divine over the fall of Albion, the de struction of Jerusalem and the fall and destruction of all the cities and nations of the earth is one of its very mov ing passages. Speaking of the cruelties of Satan the Reac tor, Jesus says: "He hath compell'd Albion to become a punisher & hath possess'd "Himself of Albion's Forests & Wilds, and Jerusalem is taken, "The City of the Woods in the Forest of Ephratah is takne1 "London is a stone of her ruins, Oxford is the dust of her walls, "Sussex & Kent are her scatter'd garments, Ireland her holy place, "And the murder'd bodies of her little ones are Scotland and Wales. "The Cities of the Nations are the smoke of her consummation, "The Nations are her dust, ground by the chariot wheels "Of her lordly conquerors, her palaces levell'd with the dust. 131 "I come that I may find a way for my banished ones to return. "Fear not, 0 little Flock, I come. Albion shall rise again." So saying the mild Sun inclos'd the Human Family. (Jerusalem 29:15-27) As so often happens in Jerusalem a lament oyer the fallen world ends with a triumphant assertion of an immi nent slavation. As we might suspect, if the whole world shares in the fall of Albion and the destruction of Jerusa lem, then the whole world also participates in the redemp tion of Albion and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. So, at the end of the lyric in plate 27 Blake says,, In my Exchanges every Land Shall walk, & mine in every Land, Mutual shall build Jerusalem, Both heart in heart & hand in hand. (85-89) If literally Blake identifies the history of England and the history of Israel, then metaphorically he uses both as redemptive history. Just as the history of Israel is seen in Christianity as the history of world redemption, so in Jerusalem Blake sees the history of Albion as the uni versal spiritual history of mankind because he sees it as parallel to the history of Israel. For, "'All things Begin •^This same tendency is characteristic of the Old Tes tament prophets— particularly Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Cf. the discussion of Bloom's identification of the struc ture of Jerusalem with the structure of Ezekiel in Appen dix I. 132 & End in Albion's Ancient Druid Rocky Shore'" (Jerusalem 27, prose). The Covenant with Israel and the Covenant with Albion The more we investigate Jerusalem the more evident it becomes that grasping the nature and the extent of the identity between Albion and Israel is crucial to the under-- standing of the poem. We find for example that the rela tionship between Jesus and Albion in Jerusalem is much like the relationship between God and Israel in the Bible--both are based on the Covenant. The notion of the covenant per vades both the Old and the New Testaments and is central to both Hebraism and redemptive history. We pointed out ear^- lier that God made a covenant with both Adam and Abraham, and that the covenant, which might have extended only to the Hebrews, was intended to be universal. In Genesis 2 8 God reaffirms that Abrahamic covenant with Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, the first of the Patriarchs, who can literally be called the father of Israel. God says, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to they seed; and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the fami lies of the earth be blessed. And behold I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. (Genesis 28:13-15) 133 This promise was made to Jacob at Bethel during his dream of the ladder, and was reaffirmed to him later at Penial. But there are some other circumstances of Jacob's life which are interesting and which we must know before we can fully understand the similarity of this covenant to the covenant between Jesus and Albion. The name Jacob means "the supplanter." He was called that because he usurped his brother's inheritance. By guile and with considerable help from his mother, Rebekah, Jacob, who was officially younger than his twin brother Esau, managed to trick Esau out of his birthright. Once the hereditary blessing had been given to Jacob by his far ther Isaac it could not be retracted, and Jacob was forced to flee the wrath of his dispossessed brother. After la boring fourteen years for the hand of his two squabbling wives in the house of his father-in-law, Laban, he returns to seek Esau and to make amends with him. (The whole fas cinating story can be read in Genesis, Chapters 26 to 35.) In Chapter 32 we find Jacob, on the night before he encoun ters his now powerful brother, for obvious reasons pacing the desert, when he is engaged in a wrestling match by an angel of the Lord. Just before dawn, Jacob discovers who his adversary is and begs him for a blessing. At this point the angel of the Lord reaffirms God's covenant with him and changes his name from Jacob, "the supplanter,'1 to Israel, "the prince of God." Then in fulfillment of the 134 first part of the promise, God gives to Israel twelve sons, who later become the twelve tribes of Israel, leads the family of Israel down to Egypt, where they become a nation, and finally brings them out of Egypt and into Canaan, the promised land. This covenant, which echoes loudly throughout the Bible, becomes the basis for all of God’s dealings with Is rael in the Old Testament, is taken over into the New Tes tament where it takes on a new significance and becomes crucial in Christ's relationship with the church and, fi nally, becomes the basis for the entry of the 144,000 faithful into the New Jerusalem, the spiritual promised land.13 In the twenty-ninth plate of Jerusalem there is a pas sage strongly reminiscent of the promise God made to Israel: And thus the Voice Divine went forth upon the rocks of Albion: "I elected Albion for my glory: I gave him to the Nations "Of the whole Earth. He was the Angel of my Presence, and all "The Sons of God were Albion's Sons, and Jerusalem was my joy . . Clines 5^8) Later in this passage the "Voice Divine," which is another name for Jesus, laments the fall of Albion and the destruc 13Cf. Hebrews 10:16, 13:20. The significance of the covenant in Jerusalem has never before been noted. It is, however, at the very center of the relationship between Jerusalem and the Bible. 135 tion of Jerusalem. But he begins by establishing that Al bion was chosen (.the word is actually "elected," but I do not think it carries its usual pejorative connotations here) to fill a special position in the world— to be 1 1 the Angel of my Presence," and that his function extended to "the whole Earth.” The terms of this covenant between Jesus and Albion are almost exactly parallel to the terms of the covenant between God and Israel. However, before we pursue this similarity, it is worth noticing that the whole passage cited above is also full of allusions to the last half of the Book of Isaiah (called Deutero-Isaiah),14 which is a prophecy concerning the post- exilic period and dealing primarily with God's relationship to Israel in the light of its covenant with him. All of the key terms in this passage are taken from Deutero-Isaiah, and, as we shall soon see, all are used there in much the same way they are used in this passage from Jerusalem. Isaiah uses the names Jacob and Israel interchangeably and sometimes with an ambiguous dual reference to both the man l^The Book of Isaiah falls into three neat divisions; (a) Chapters 1-35f (b) Chapters 36-39, (c) chapters 40-66. Although there are grave problems of authorship in Isaiah, it is usually assumed that the first part was probably written by Isaiah the prophet. The second part, with the exception of a short passage (38:9-'40), consists of histor ical narratives derived from II Kings-18:13r-20:19. The third part is by common consent not the work of Isaiah, and has been called the Second- or Deutero- Isaiah. Jacobus:, p. 370. 136 and the nation. The central point of Deutero-Isaiah is that God will honor his covenant in spite of Israel's wick edness if they repent. But before we can fully grasp the significance of this covenant, or its similarity to the covenant between Jesus and Albion, there are several no tions which are present both in the Bible and in Jerusalem which must be developed. First, both Albion and Israel, in almost exactly the same way, exist on more than one level. Israel, both in the Old and New Testaments, exists on at least four. He is obviously a person, an individual who lived in history, and at a certain point in history made a covenant with God. He is also the father of a nation, and as such he gives his name, Israel, to that nation. And when that nation became established in a particular geographical area, they give their name to that area. But because that nation was founded on a special, spiritual covenant with God, its name is extended to all those who are faithful to, or character ized by that covenant. So that, those who are faithful to the covenant between Israel and God become Children of Is-' rael and thus Children of God, whether they are Gentile or Jew. Therefore, in the New Testament a very clear distinct tion is drawn between the physical and spiritual seed of Israel. In Matthew Chapter 8 a Roman centurion comes to Jesus with a plea for the restoration of his dying servant. When Christ promises to come to his house and heal the 137 servant, the centurion replies, "Lord, X am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed . . . ." (verse 9) Christ's answer to the centurion clearly establishes that there are Children of Israel who are not physical descen dants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob: "Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom [Israel] shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." (verses 10-12) However the most explicit statements of the same distinc tion come from the Pauline Epistles. Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants . . . and the promises; . . . For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel: Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: . . . That is. They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed. (Romans 9:4-8) Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; that at the time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: But now in Christ Jesus, ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. (Ephesians 2:11-13) Throughout all of these passages it is clear that it is the children of God who are the children of Israel and not the physical descendants of patriarchs. That is, Children of 138 Israel, in the New Testament, can be recognized by their relationship to God rather than by their relationship to the Jewish patriarchs. The name Albion functions in much the same way. Al bion is certainly a person, mythological to be sure, but for Blake easily as real as Israel. He is a character, taking his place along with other characters such as Vala and Reuben in the drama of the poem. But in Blake's system, Albion is also the father of a nation, and as such he gives his name to that nation and to the island they inhabit. The use of Albion as a poetic name for England is of course conventional. It goes all the way back to Pliny in first century Rome, and was probably made current in England by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Edmund Spenser, where Blake prob- ably got many of the ideas he associates with Albion. How ever, Blake is unique when he suggests that Albion like Israel stands for a certain kind of spiritual relationship. In the passage we have previously quoted, Jesus says, '"and all / The Sons of God were Albion's Sons . . ' (11:7-8). Clearly, Albion's sons are of the nature of God's sons. The sequence in this line is important. It is not that all of the sons of Albion are God's sons. That would imply that there are other sons of God who are not Albion's sons. The relationship would then be accidental. It is that all of the sons of God are Albion's sons, which makes the relationship essential or characteristic. That 139 is, because there is a covenant between Jesus and Albion, all those who are faithful to that covenant are simulta neously children of both Jesus and Albion because they are of the nature of that covenant. So we can see that Blake's use of Albion in Jerusalem is very similar to the way Is rael is used in the Bible. He does, however, differ in one respect. Albion is also Everyman, a kind of Adamic figure, or as critics point out, an Adam Cadmon. Israel does not become Everyman the way Albion does, because the Bible has another character, Adam, to serve that function. Blake combines all these levels in Albion and reserves Adam for other purposes. Second, both Israel and Albion are 'elected.' That Israel is a chosen nation by virtue of God's covenant with their fathers Abraham and Jacob, is by now clear. That Al bion or England is a chosen nation is clearly implied by the way Blake allows Albion to assume Israel's position in his system. But neither Israel nor Albion was chosen for . . . the aggregate of spirits we call mankind or humanity . . . Blake calls Albion (Adam in Blake has his regular place as the symbol of the physical body or the natural man)." Fearful Symmetry, p. 44. Cf. also fn. 2 for what Frye has to say of therelationship between Albion and Israel. ■^This is not a new idea with Blake, The notion that the English are a chosen people in the same way that the Jews were a chosen people has long been expounded. Fisch says that "For Milton, the sacred community is above all the English people marvelously chosen to be the heralds of salvation for the human race" (p. 123). The same notion of 140 reasons of any special worthiness. That Israel is special we have already suggested and is clearly implied by these three passages from Deutero-Isaiah. But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have cho sen, the seed of Abraham my friend. (Isaiah 41:8) And I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob, and out of Judah an inheritor of my mountains; and mine elect shall inherit it, and my servants shall dwell there. (Isaiah 65:9) Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy redeemer, and the holy one of Israel. (Isaiah 41:14) It is the 'worm Jacob,' in ’need' of a 'redeemer,' whom God has 'elected' to be the channel of his redemption to the world. The same is true of Albion. Jesus is here reaf firming his covenant, not with a redeemed, but with a fallen Albion. And anyone who has felt the magnitude of Albion's fall, as Blake describes it in Jerusalem, must ac knowledge that his election could have only been by grace. Third, both Israel and Albion are 'elected' (1) for essentially the same purpose, (2) to serve essentially the same function, and (3) to occupy essentially the same posi tion. Albion, we are told, was elected 'for my [Jesus'1 glory.' That is the purpose. Christ's greatest act is the redemption of mankind. Therefore, it is the act which special election is applied to the Christians in the New Testament and led to Calvin's doctrine of predestination. brings him the greatest glory, and the one who is chosen as the chief human agent of that redemption has the greatest part in bringing glory to Christ. Since Albion was chosen for that purpose, through Albion, Jesus will be glorified. Israel also shares in this purpose. Israel's role in God's redemptive plan is implicit throughout the Old Testament and is explicit in Isaiah where God says of Israel, 'I have created him for my glory' (Isaiah 43:7). Even more impor tant, God's use of a fallen Albion and apostate Israel as vessels of his salvation does not diminish his glory but adds a great new brightness to it. What reflects God^s glory more than his mercy and wisdom in using man, in spite of his wickedness, as a crucial agent in his redemptive plan? Jerusalem is aware of this principle when she says, "If I were Pure I should never "Have known Thee: If I were Unpolluted I should Never have "Glorified thy Holiness or rejoiced in thy great Salvation." (Jerusalem 61:44-46) Albion is also 'elected* to be 'the Angel of my [JesusJ Presence.’ That is his function. Again we have an allu sion to Deutero-Isaiah which helps to explain Blake's use of the word 'presence* in this passage: 'In all their [Is^ rael's] affliction he [GodJ was afflicted, and the Angel of his presence saved them' (63:9).17 Albion's function is to 17The Hebrew word, panim, which is here rendered 'presence,' actually means 'face' or 'countenance.' Israel, and by implication Albion, is God's face to the world. 142 be the representative of Jesus on earth. Or put another way, it is Albion's function as Christ's substitute to be redemptive. In fact, Albion is charged with Christ's highest mission— to be savior to man in his stead. Once again, the same idea is suggested in the call to Israel, and is explicitly reiterated in God's successive covenants with Israel. The 'Voice Divine' goes on to affirm, 'I gave him [Al bion] to the nations / Of the whole Earth.' That is his position. Perhaps the most important notion in this line is the extent of Albion's dominion. The whole earth will come under Albion as a result of his relationship to Jesus. The same is true of God's promise to Israel. Both Albion and Israel occupy a position of global headship. The posi tion is not, however, political. Neither Albion nor Israel will rule by virtue of might and power, they will possess the world by virtue of their position as agents of divine redemption. Blake makes this principle clear in his ad dress to the Deists. But you also charge the poor Monks & Religious with being the causes of War, while you acquit & flatter the Alexanders & Caesars, the Lewises & Fredericks, who alone are its causes & its actors. But the Religion of Jesus, Forgiveness of Sin, can never be the cause of a War nor of a single Martyrdom. Those who Martyr others or who cause War are Deists, but never can be forgivers of Sin. The glory of Chris tianity is to Conquer by Forgiveness. All the Destruc tion, therefore, in Christian Europe has arisen from Deism, which is Natural Religion. (Jerusalem 52, prose) 143 The construction, here, is once again vital. Jesus does not say, 'I gave to him the Nation / Of the whole Earth' he says 'I gave him to the Nations' [italics mine]. The principle asserted here is the same as the one Jesus asserted when he washed the disciples' feet. It is the principle which ultimately led him to the cross and which made him victor over those who had him captive when he prayed, 'Father forgive them' (Luke 23:24). As Jesus said to his disciples when they were 'disputing' 'who should be the greatest' (Mark 9:34) in the kingdom of God. "If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all [or make himself last of alll, and servant of all."18 (Mark 9:35) Both of these promises, the one to Israel and the one to Albion, seem to imply the ultimate and universal redemp tion of mankind. All the families of the earth shall be blessed in Israel, because, through his agency as God's representative on earth, they can all experience redemption. And all the nations of the earth will be given to Albion, because all will ultimately come into a like relationship with the 'Voice Divine.' The Covenant of Priam But there is more to be said about covenants both in l^There is present in these notions, also the primi tive Christian doctrine of Christ's love. We are now in a better position to appreciate the great distance Blake has come from the Orcian redemption of the earlier works. the Bible and in Jerusalem. The Old Testament covenant, which was intended to be a blessing for the world through the Israelites, became a curse both to the Israelites and the world because it was too narrowly identified with the Jewish legal system. It was therefore necessary for God to provide a corrective to the legalistic interpretation of the Old Testament covenant. This corrective came in the person and work of Jesus in the New Testament. The name, the New Testament, reflects the fact that it is the record of a new covenant. In Jerusalem Blake calls the old cove<r nant, the 'Covenant of Priam,' and the new covenant, the 'Covenant of Jehovah.' But before we can understand this relationship, we must look more closely at covenantal his^-- tory in the Old and New Testaments, and at how Blake appro priates the- notions contained there. The covenant between God and Israel in the Old Testao- ment became primarily national, although it was meant to be; universal. Although God saw Israel as a river of blessing to all mankind, Israel became a kind of stagnant Dead Sea into which blessings flowed but from which there was no efo-.; fluence. The covenant also came to be primarily legal (so that the covenant and the Sinaiatic law became almost syn onymous to the Jews), although it was intended to be pri marily spiritual. And although the law did have a legiti mate place in God's redemptive plan, its purpose was badly misunderstood and it took on an exaggerated importance. Itj 145 | | was partly to set right these Old Testament misconceptions j about the covenant and to insure its universal realization j that Jesus came. If there was any doubt as to the signifi- j j cance and meaning of the covenant before the resurrection, there could be none after. In fact the new interpretation of the covenant varied so radically from the old that it was called a New Covenant. ^ Blake reflects exactly the same notion in his annotations to Watson's Apology. He says, The laws of the Jews were (both ceremonial & real) the basest & most oppressive of human codes, & being like all other codes given under pretence of divine command were what Christ pronounced them, the Abomination that maketh desolate, i.e. State Religion, which is the source i of all Cruelty. i (K. 393) j Why did Christ come? Was it not to abolish the Jewish Imposture? (K. 387) Now, the sign of the covenant was circumcision. Al- j i though this rite was not practiced exclusively by the He- j i brews, they seem to have been unique in their belief that j i circumcision was a sign of purification. Among extra- | biblical peoples the primary significance was that of a Hebrews 8-12 deals explicitly with this shift. Af ter devoting a good deal of time to describing the inade- i quacies of the ceremonial law— the old covenant— and the j advantages of the law of grace— the new covenant— the i writer to the Hebrews boldly asserts "He [Jesus] abolishes j the first [old covenant] in order to establish the second j [new covenant]" (10:9). Blakefs assertion below is prob ably an allusion to this passage. 146 sacrifice designed to insure fertility, but from the earli est days the idea of purification seems, to have supplanted this conception among the Hebrews. "The ceremony indicated the casting off of uncleanness as a preparation for en- 20 trance into the privileges of membership in Israel." It implied the recognition that man was born unclean, and that to be a child of Israel was also to be a child of God, which made purification necessary. It was as much in the rite of circumcision as in actual parentage that a child became a son of Jacob. The same sign was taken over into the New Testament where it has much of the same significance. In Ephesians chapter two for example, Paul, metaphorically, equates the uncircumcised Gentile with life in the flesh and the cir cumcised Jew with life in the spirit. But his was the cir cumcision of the "heart" rather than the circumcision of the "flesh" (Romans 2:29). For circumcision, as is true of all rites, is an outward sign of an inward reality, but there is no essential relationship between the outward and the inward. That is, it is possible to purify oneself withr- out being circumcised, just as it is possible to be circum cised without being pure. The circumcision of the flesh 20Jacobus, p. 138. "Sanctification of . . . life was symbolized by the purification of the organ by which life was produced." Merrill F. Unger, Bible Dictionary (Chicago, 1957), p. 207. 147 can only reflect but not insure the circumcision of the heart. But as so often happens with religious ritual, the presence of the outward sign comes to be taken as absolute evidence of the inward realization— hence sacramental the- 91 ology, or as Blake called it, 'Mystery.1 So, in the development of the Hebrew religion, the significance of circumcision, in practice if not in doctrine, gradually be gan to change from a sign of purification to a sign of purity— from the recognition of the need for salvation from a fallen condition, to the evidence of a self-sufficient purity. Blake sees this trend and introduces into Jerusalem a ^Contrary to what I have just said, there is a way in which the message in Jerusalem is essentially sacraraentar- ian. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago, 1963), III, 120-124, identifies "two modes of communication in re-, lation to the Spiritual Presence." He says, "Words which communicate the Spiritual Presence become the Word (with a capital 'W'), or in traditional terms, the Word of God. Objects which are vehicles of the divine Spirit become sac ramental materials and elements in a sacramental act." The sacramental act, then, from the standpoint of man, becomes an act of perception. Any experience with any object in which man experiences the Spiritual Presence is a sacramen tal act. As Tillich says, "The largest sense of the term [sacramental] denotes everything in which the Spiritual Presence has been experienced." However, when the Church comes to feel that "the sacrament has effects by virtue of its mere performance, the centered act of faith, is not es sential to its saving power." It distorts "the sacraments into non-personal acts of magical technique" and "peryerts religion into magic in order to gain objective grace from the divine power." It is sacramentalism in the largest sense which is to be found in Blake, and this second magi-, cal perversion of sacramentalism which Blake identifies with mystery. 148 new sign which aptly signified it. In the fifty-fifth plate the ’Living Creatures' say, "The Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate Identity; "Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually, "On Circumcision, not on Virginity, 0 Reasoners of AlbionI" (55:64-66 [italics mine]) The emphasis here falls on the contrast between circumci sion and virginity. Virginity, unlike circumcision, stands for a state of primal innocence and not for an act of purif ication. But, like circumcision, virginity is also an outward sign of an inward reality, so that it is possible, in fact likely, and in Blake's view absolutely certain, that one might be physically virginal yet spiritually vio late. Literature is full of examples. A very un-Blakian case in point is that picaresque hero, the Poet Laureate of Maryland, Ebenezer Cooke, in Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, who puts so jnuch store in his virginity, but who has none theless been violated by so many people in so many differ ent ways. The striking contrast between circumcision and virginity becomes immediately evident if we be permitted to alter these lines somewhat (an alteration which does them little violence, however, given the close relationship be tween 'Truth' and 'Purity,' 'Falsehood' and 'Sin* in Jeru salem) . They might well be altered to read: 'Establish ment of Purity depends on the Forgiveness of Sins continu ally, on Circumcision, not on Virginity.' Once altered, a ; 149 j clear parallel between circumcision and forgiveness of sins,j and a clear contrast between circumcision and virginity, emerges. Of the last two, the first is a redemptive pro cess with salvation as its end, the second is a state— in Blake, ironically the state of Ulro damnation. Although Blake did not write the lines as we have ren- ; dered them, he might well have, for they express an essen tial truth found everywhere in Jerusalem. If the word "circumcision" appears only here in Jerusalem with this meaning, (It appears again with a totally unrelated meaning ; in Jerusalem 98:18.) the word 'Uncircumcision,' or forms of it, appears seven times and always in a similar context and with the same significance. In Jerusalem 8:30-33 Los calls ; his Spectre "my Pride & Self-righteousness,' and accuses him of 'Uncircumcised pretences to Chastity.' In 30:9-13 Enitharmon and Urthona, the Emanation and Spectre of Los, j j wandering through the loins of fallen Albion, see there ! 'the Sexual Religion [usually associated in Blake, as we have seen, with the Religion of Natural Morality and moral law or Deism] in its embryon Uncircumcision.' In 44:21-27 i ! Blake, the narrator of the poem, describing Albion vegetat- j i ing in Ulro, speaks of 'the Spectrous Uncircumcised Vege- j tation / Forming a Sexual Machine, an Aged Virgin Form.' j In 49:42-48 Erin is contrasting, for the Daughters of Beulah, the 'Uncircumcision in Heart & Loins' found 'In Egypt & Philistia, in Moab & Edom & Aram,' (the enemies of 150 Israel), with the 'Self Annihilation1 (which in Jerusalem is basically synonymous with the Forgiveness of Sins), to be found in'Jerusalem's Courts.' In 49:63-64 Erin, still speaking of Jerusalem's enemies, says, 'they drink the con^ demn'd Soul & rejoice / In cruel holiness in their Heavens of Chastity & Uncircumcision.1 In 60:29-30 the Divine Lamb pleads with Jerusalem, 'Why wilt thou deface thy beauty & the beauty of thy little-ones / To please thy Idols in the pretended chastities of Uncircumcision?' But probably the most moving statement of the same idea is in plate 60:45-^49 where the narrator is describing the joy Vala takes in the punishment and pain of Jerusalem. All night Vala hears, she triumphs in pride of holiness To see Jerusalem deface her lineaments with bitter blows Of despair, while the Satanic Holiness tri umph'd in Vala In a Religion of Chastity f i t Uncircumcised Selfishness Both of the Head & Heart & Loins, clos'd up in Moral Pride. [italics mine] Throughout these passages there is a basic antithesis between uncircumcised chastity and circumcision or forgive^* j ness of sins. Uncircumcision is everywhere associated yri.th; moral pride and self-righteousness, cruel holiness, the sexual religion of pretended chastity and virginity--all are identified as characteristic of idols, spectres and the Satanic principle in general. No better way presents it self for us to feel the strength of Blake's repugnance for ; 151 the legalism of Old Testament Judaism. Rather than seeing in the law, , or in man's inability to follow the law the evidence of man's sinful and fallen condition, Israel began to see in the law a way of salvation. But the only way to be saved under the law is to maintain a perfectly sinless life, or to preserve virginity. Blake came to identify this characteristic of later Judaism with Druidism and then with the Religion of Natural Morality of the Deists and finally with the official Roman and protestant state reli gions. Each, in one way or another insisted on virginity, which according to Blake and the Bible is an impossible de mand. And it is significant that the title 'virgin' is ap plied more frequently to Vala, Tirzah and Rahab by the spectrous sons of Albion than it is to anyone else in the poem, including Jerusalem who is frequently called a harlot. Around these three goddesses the sons of Albion, led by the Reactor, built a religion based on sexual chastity—^a reli-s gion which though it was impossible to follow gave them plentiful occasion to indulge themselves in the cruel self" righteous sacrifice of their victimsi There is bitter irony in the fact that the Sons of Albion ultimately become victims of their own cruel laws. As Blake warns, 'He who makes his law a curse, / By his own law shall surely die' (Jerusalem 27:83-84). During the horrid sacrifice of Luvah Sudden they [the Sons of Albion] become like what they behold, in howlings & deadly pain: I 152 Spasms smite their features, sinews & limbs: pale they look on one another: They turn, contorted: their iron necks bend unwilling towards Luvah: their lips tremble: their muscular fibers are cramp'd & smitten: They become like what they behold! (Jerusalem 65:75-79) One of the most explicit descriptions of the religion of chastity comes to us from Erin's magnificent speech to the Daughters of Beulah. The speech comes right at the end of Chapter Two, and is, in some ways, the most important speech in the chapter. It lays out for the first time, comprehensively, Albion's need and Albion's hope. It is also a thorough analysis of the religion of chastity. Mid way in the speech, Erin addresses the Spectre, who is Satan, and laments, "0 Polypus of Death! 0 Spectre over Europe and Asia, "Withering the Human Form by Laws of Sacri fice for Sin! "By Laws of Chastity & Abhorrence I am with- . er'd up: ; "Striving to Create a Heaven in which all shall be pure & holy "In their Own Selfhoods: in Natural Selfish Chastity to Banish Pity "And dear Mutual Forgiveness, & to become One Great Satan "Inslav'd to the most powerful Selfhood: to murder the Divine Humanity "In whose sight all are as the dust & who chargeth his Angels with folly! j (Jerusalem 49:2.4-31) Erin, who, in Jerusalem, stands for love, feels herself "'■wither'd up'" "'By Laws of Chastity'" which are an "'Ab horrence,'" The "'Laws of Chastity1" are abhorrent because; 153 they form the basis of the Spectre's attempt "'to Create a Heaven in which all shall be pure & holy / In their Own Selfhoods.'" But Erin knows that fallen man, under the do minion of his spectre, can never be holy or pure under the law. Salvation under the law assumes that man is perfect ible. But Blake is quite adamant in his view that man is not perfectible, he is only redeemable. In the lines which immediately follow this passage, Erin goes on to describe the nature of man. There is little doubt that she con siders man a fallen creature. Some of her feeling about man is evident in the last line of the passage above. She says that 'Satan' has devised the religion of chastity "'to murder the Divine Humanity [Jesus] / In whose sight all are as the dust.1" We shall come to the discussion of the na ture of man in the last chapter. Here it is sufficient to notice that there is a clear distinction in Jerusalem be tween 'man' and 'Humanity.' The first is fallen; the sec ond is 'Divine.' Man is a distorted and ruined form of the Divine Humanity. As Blake says in the preface to Chapter Three, 'Man is born a Spectre or Satan & is altogether an Evil, & requires a New Selfhood continually, & must be con tinually changed into his direct Contrary' (Jerusalem 52, prose). It is evident from this statement that man cannot save himself by the observance of the moral law. He cannot preserve virginity because he has never had it. The law is useful only because it makes man aware of his fallen 154 condition; it cannot save him from that condition. The law can only damn, it cannot save. What man needs more than anything else is a new nature— 'a New Selfhood.’ Only the forgiveness of sin, which brings about the annihilation of the old selfhood and creates a new selfhood can do that. And the symbol of this act is circumcision, not virginity. It is this religion of uncircumcised virginity that Blake identifies as 'the Covenant of Priam, the Moral Vir tues of the Heathen' (Jerusalem 98;46). Blake's most desperate attempt to destroy this erro neous notion of the covenant of Jehovah is probably found in his interpolated attack on the virgin birth of Christ in the sixty-first plate of Jerusalem. I do not believe that Blake cared a fig whether Mary was actually, physically a virgin at the time of Christ's birth. What he was denying so violently, however, was the notion of the immaculate conception.^2 or at most, we can say that he found the first repugnant because it led so easily to the second. Indeed, the doctrine of the two natures of Christ in his incarnated state has always been one of the most difficult paradoxes, and most frequent sources of controversy in ^ Fearful Symmetry, p. 393. "Blake's real attack is not so much on the Virgin Birth as on the Immaculate Con-^ ception, the doctrine of what he calls a "Virgin Eve," and which is the attempt to keep the Christian vision asso ciated with an eternally chaste female principle who is never subject to human desires." 155 Christian theology. How Jesus could be both man, with all the limitations of fallen humanity, and God, with all the attributes of divinity, has always boggled the understand ing and frustrated the imaginations of theologians. Conse quently, Christian sects have tended to emphasize one or the other. Those who have wished to stress his divine per fection have found occasion in the virgin birth. They pos tulate that somehow at the time of conception, which was by the Holy Ghost, Mary was shielded from the effect of her sinful human parentage. From a momentary relief from sin fulness to a total exoneration from sinfulness, is an easy step. So Mary like Christ was thought to be sinless. Where such a doctrine comes apart is in its failure to see that the problem has simply been moved back a generation, (If Christ's sinlessness is dependent on the sinlessness of Mary, then Mary's sinlessness is dependent on the sinless ness of her parents.) and its failure to see that if Christ is at all efficacious as the redeemer it is precisely be cause he is both man and God. If Christ is the link be tween God and man, then a Christ not completely God, or not completely man, is a link too short at one end. Blake saw, and proclaimed clearly that if Christ was to bear the sin of the world, he would have to be touched by it. 156 He took on Sin in the Virgins Womb And on the Cross he Seal'd its doom. (K. 749) More important, the whole passage is an example given by Jesus to the stricken and remorseful Jerusalem who doubts the Savior's will and ability to save one- as sinful as she. In plate sixty we find the 'Divine Lamb1 who has 'been pierced in the House of [his] Friends' (line 53) standing over Jerusalem, who is 'deluded by the turning mills' (line 63) and who wonders how her 'Lord and Savior' (line 52) can pity and save her in spite of her sins and blasphemy. "For thou also sufferest with me, altho' I behold thee not: "And altho' I sin & blaspheme thy holy name, thou pitiest me ..." (lines 61-62) Jesus responds by giving Jerusalem the vision of Joseph and Mary. In the vision Joseph, who has been wronged by his adulterous wife, is willing to forgive Mary, although only after some coaxing from Jehovah. The passage ends with the triumphal assertion of the mercies of the Covenant of Jeho vah. Joseph reports hearing the voice of the Angel of Jehovah in his dream. ^There is a neat irony in the first line of this pas sage. Christ took on "Sin1 1 in a "Virgins Womb." In fact the full import of this line is not revealed unless we un derstand and keep in mind what has just been said about Blake's attitude to Virginity. 157 "Saying, "Doth Jehovah Forgive a Debt only on condition that it shall "'Be Payed? Doth he Forgive Pollution only on conditions of Purity? "'That Debt is not Forgiven1 That Pollution in not Forgiven1 "'Such is the Forgiveness of the Gods, the Moral Virtues of the "'Heathen whose tender Mercies are Cruelty. But Jehovah1s Salvation "'Is without Money & without Price, in the Continual Forgiveness of Sins, "'In the Perpetual Mutual Sacrifice in Great Eternity: for behold, "'There is none that liveth & Sinneth notl And this is the Covenant '"Of Jehovah: If you Forgive one-another, so shall Jehovah Forgive You, '"That He Himself may Dwell among You. Fear not then to take "'To thee Mary thy Wife, for she is with Child by the Holy Ghost.'" (Jerusalem 61:17-27) In contrast then, to the Covenant of Priam— the reli gion of uncircumcision and virginity, we have here the 'Covenant of Jehovah,' which is grounded firmly on the knowledge that 'There is none that liveth and Sinneth not,' that virginity is impossible, and that sees the hope of salvation only in the 'Continual Forgiveness of Sins, / In the Perpetual Mutual Sacrifice in Great Eternity.' As both Blake and the New Testament make clear, it was to establish this covenant that Jesus came. The Covenant of Jehovah In the ninety-eighth plate of Jerusalem, Blake again * comes to the 'Covenant of Jehovah.' There, in a passage which describes the reordering of the senses after Albion's redemption, it is again identified with 'Forgiveness of Sins,' which is defined as 'Self Annihilation' and 'an EterH nal Death & Resurrection.' In plate seven Los speaks to ! his spectre of the 'anguish of regeneration' and the 'ter rors of self annihilation' and in plate forty-nine, Erin prophesies that the fallen sons and daughters of Albion | '"shall arise from Self / by Self Annihilation into Jerusa- , lem's Courts . . .11' There is clustered around Blake's notion of the 'Covenant of Jehovah' a number of ideas which I are all related. They are: 'Continual Forgiveness of Sins,' 'the Perpetual Mutual Sacrifice,' 'Self Annihila tion,' 'Eternal Death & Resurrection' and 'Regeneration.' j Man's regeneration from his 'Selfhood,' which is Man's sin, is brought about by all the rest. 'Selfhood' is defined as man's will for self-assertion, his desire for tyrannic j power, almost in a sense, his desperate will to live by a I I determined assertion of life— in short, the 'Selfhood* is ; j what John calls 'the pride of Life* (I John 2:16). Blake, ! however, acknowledges the primitive Christian principle : that life comes only by giving it up. '''For whosoever will! save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his j j life for my sake shall find it"' (Matthew 16:25). The way j i to annihilate the selfhood is not to crush it, this only j creates a new selfhood. The way to annihilate it is to j 159 love it and forgive it— that is, to die for it.^4 This act of forgiveness is essentially the surrender of one’s own rights, and ultimately the denial of one's right to live. It is also uniquely a divine act— as in the vision which Joseph has of the 'Covenant of Jehovah'"If you Forgive one-another, so shall Jehovah Forgive you, / That He Him self may Dwell among You."' It is in the act of forgive ness that man sees the evidence of the indwelling spirit of God,* or that he becomes redemptive as God is redemptive. In fact man’s very existence is dependent on this act of divine self-sacrifice. Jesus makes this abundantly clear in his answer to Albion's question, . "Cannot Man exist without Mysterious "Offering of Self for Another? is this Friend ship & Brotherhood?" Jesus said: "Wouldest thou love one who never dies "For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? "And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself "Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love "As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death "In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brothferhood." (Jerusalem 96:20-28) The Covenant of Jehovah is hard. It demands that Al bion cast himself into the ’Furnaces of affliction’ out of 24John Middleton Murry, William Blake (New York, 1933), pp. 236-240. 160 love and pity for his ’Friend Divine. ’ When he does (Jeru- j i salem 96:20-43) the furnaces become 'Fountains of Living Water flowing from the Humanity Divine.' But it is also j | merciful, for the harsh 'Covenant of Priam' is once and for : all time destroyed. "Where is the Covenant of Priam, the Moral Virtues of the Heathen? "Where is the Tree of Good & Evil that rooted beneath the cruel heel "Of Albion's Spectre, the Patriarch Druid? where are all his Human Sacrifices "For Sin in War & in the Druid Temples of the Accuser of Sin, beneath "The Oak Groves of Albion that cover'd the whole Earth beneath his Spectre? "Where are the Kingdoms of the World & all their glory that grew on Desolation, "The Fruit of Albion's Poverty Tree, when the Triple Headed Gog-Magog Giant "Of Albion Taxed the Nations into Desolation & j then gave the Spectrous Oath?" (Jerusalem 98:46-53) This new covenant, which Blake calls the Covenant of Jehovah, is the covenant of grace. It is the gospel— the I good news that man need live no longer under the harsh } | tutelage of the old covenant with its impossible demands of j i I virginity under the law, and that he might now hope for a j i new righteousness by the forgiveness of sins based on the j i sacrifice of Christ. Almost everything in the New Testa- j i ment is aimed at establishing this new covenant. As the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, I He [Christ] is the mediator of a better covenant, which j was established upon better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been found for the second. . . . "Behold, the days come,' saith the Lord, "when I will make a new covenant 161 with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand and led them out of the land of Egypt . . ."25 (Hebrews, 8:6-9) From this passage it might seem that the covenant which Christ came to establish was in complete opposition to the Old Testament covenant. At times the New Testament writers and Christ himself tend to give this impression too. We have already gone some way in making this notion seem in-, evitable by our discussion of the conflict between Jesus and the Jewish establishment. And it is true that at the age of twelve, when he ran away from hi.s parents to debate the scribes and the Pharisees in the Temple, Jesus entered into mortal struggle with the forces of Jewish establish- mentarianism— a struggle which ended in his victory on the cross. The conclusive evidence of this victory is his res urrection on the third day, but the rending of the veil of the temple is evidence of another sort and speaks more di-. rectly to our present point. We have already demonstrated that two conceptions stand out clearly in Blake's use of the 'Veil.' One is the conception of the mysterious priesthood, which is the foun dation of establishmentarianism, and the second is the con ception of the moral law with its propensity for cruel 25The last part of this passage is a quotation from Jeremiah 31:31-33. There, the inadequacy of the old and the need of a new covenant is clearly recognized. 162 sacrifice and self-righteous war on the part of those who live by it. Therefore, when Christ rent the veil of the temple he struck a death blow at both the Levitical priest hood and at the law. He was taking the privilege of the few and making it the property of the many. He opened a new way for individual and personal access into the pres ence of God. We have also shown that in Jerusalem the feminine tabernacle is the center of worship for the votaries of the religion of chastity just as the tabernacle was the center of worship for the Israelites in the Old Testament. Imme diately after the victory songs of the frustrated warriors in the sixty-eighth plate of Jerusalem (from which we quoted extensively in chapter one), the narrator tells us both how the feminine tabernacle with its laws of sexual chastity came to be, and how they were destroyed. He tells us that the tabernacle and all its offerings rose in the wilderness because the loves of Beulah were 'stolen by se cret amorous theft' and were perverted by jealousies, laws and punishments (Jerusalem 69:6-31). He concludes, And now the Spectres of the Dead awake in Beulah; all The Jealousies become Murderous, uniting to gether in Rahab A Religion of Chastity, Forming a Commerce to sell Loves, With Moral Law an Equal Balance not going down with decision. Therefore the Male severe & cruel, fill'd with stern Revenge, 163 Mutual Hate returns & mutual Deceit & mutual SI* (Jerusalem, 69:32-37) There is a distinct similarity and a clear parallel between the religion of chastity as presented in Jerusalem and legalistic Judaism as presented in the Old Testament. In fact the images and symbols which Blake uses to present his notion come right out of the Old Testament. Conse quently, when the Bard describes the rending of the veil by Christ, he implies that the action insured the death of both the religion of chastity and the Jewish legal system. Hence the Infernal Veil grows in the disobed ient Female, Which Jesus rends & the whole Druid Law re moves away From the Inner Sanctuary, A false Holiness hid within the Center. For the Sanctuary of Eden is in the Camp, in the Outline, In the Circumference, & every Minute Particular is Holy: Embraces are Cominglings from the Head even to the Feet, And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret Place. (Jerusalem, 69:38-44) As usual the passage demonstrates the overwhelming density and complexity of almost every line in Jerusalem. Many ideas jostle each other in this passage, but there is no confusion. All is harmony, and the passage presents a uni fied point of view. More relevant, however, is the con trast between the 'Center1 and the 'Circumference,1 between the 'Inner Sanctuary' or 'Secret Place' and the 'Camp.' Old Testament Judaism and the religion of chastity had made 164 | a sanctuary of the ’Secret Place' and had thus inculcated aj r 'False Holiness' based on the 'Druid Law.' But in Eden the! sanctuary is in the 'Camp.1 By rending the veil, Jesus j establishes that fact, because the rending of the veil 're" moves away' the 'whole Druid Law.' Incidentally, it is in-i teresting to notice that in lines forty to forty-two, Blake j describes the significance of this act largely in Hebraic terms. The image is that of the Children of Israel camped about the tabernacle in the wilderness. They have come to believe that access to the Divine is possible only through the tabernacle with its Holy of Holies, and suddenly they discover that God is everywhere, and that everyone has ac cess to him at all times. In the last two lines of the passage the imagery becomes largely sexual, but the Hebraic imagery is still there in the person of the High Priest j entering the Holy of Holies. With the rending of the veil j the High Priest (priesthood) is dead, and the privilege j which was his alone has become the property of all the peo-| f pie. As the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament clearly proclaims, Christ himself has become the High j Priest. But he is a High Priest who provides unlimited ac-j | cess to God, because through his act, the right of access ! ! no longer depends on purity but on forgiveness. Man must j I be pure to approach a righteous God, and there are only two j I possible ways for man to be pure. Either he must maintain a perfectly sinless life (which Blake calls virginity), or he must claim the forgiveness of sins. Since the first is impossible, man's only hope is in the second. But for giveness (to give for) may only be granted on the. condition of prior payment. That is, the one who forgives, cancels the debt by paying it himself. This payment Christ satis fied with his own willing death. Because Christ gave him self as payment for the sins of man, mankind need not pay the price of punishment under the law. There seems to be in this act, in this rejection of the ark of the covenant by the rending of the veil, in this substitution of righ teousness by grace under the forgiveness of sin for righ- teousness by merit under the moral law, a real denial of i the whole Old Testament pattern. And at times it would | seem that Christ was putting himself in direct opposition to the old covenant. ! However there is also in the New Testament a real | j sense of its continuity with the Old Testament. Christ j himself is ever conscious that he is a fulfillment of the j Old Testament. In the Sermon on the Mount, he says, ' "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the proph- j ets: X am not come to destroy, but to fulfill"' (Matthew | 5:17). And it must be admitted that there is nothing es- I 1 sentially inconsistent between the spirit of the Old Testa- j I ment covenant of law and the New Testament covenant of ! grace. In fact, Christ fulfills the Old Testament in at least three ways. First, he is the fulfillment of the Old 166 ; Testament legal system. Second, he is the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophetic tradition. Third, he is the fulfillment of the Old Testament covenant. The Old Testament legal system was basically comprised of the moral law, the cermonial law and the priesthood. Christ in his one act, at the same time, fulfilled and thereby abolished all three. The moral law was a perfect code of behavior. That is, if it were possible to follow the demands of the moral law scrupulously, it would lead to a perfect life. But since even the most scrupulous obser vance of the moral law must inevitably be doomed to fail, some provisions had to be made for mankind which found it impossible to succeed. The ceremonial law--an intricate system of sacrifices, offerings and c leans in gs-^was that provision, and the priesthood was responsible for its adr ministration. Seen in this context, all three become pro visions of mercy. The law does not create sin, it only points it out. The ceremonial law was not intended to be a tyrannical burden, but to be a joyous relief from the bur den of sin. The priests were not meant to be tyrants but liberators. It is the intention of the Old Testament legal system that Christ fulfills. The negative moral law of the Old Testament ('Thou shalt not') dies with Christ on the cross and is resurrected with him as an affirmative law of love. : As he says in the Gospels, all the law is contained in two j 167 commands: '"thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself."' In much the same way the whole ceremonial law is satisfied once and for all by Christ's death on the cross. The ceremonial law was, as it were, a temporary provision which was efficacious to remove sin only insofar as it prefigured the final sacrifice of Christ. For those who did not claim the sacrifice of Christ even as they performed the ceremonial law, it was useless. When the final sacrifice was complete, it was needless. The writer to the Hebrews makes this point explicitly. For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of those things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. (Hebrews 10:1) And every priest standeth daily ministering and offer- ing oftentimes the same sacrifices which can never take away sins; but this man [Jesus], after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God . . . (Hebrews 10:11-12) [Jesus] needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this he did once when he offered up himself. (Hebrews 7:27) The Old Testament legal system then, as it was in tended, pointed directly to the person and act of Jesus. It was a provision which prefigured the final sacrifice of Christ and satisfied the requirements of God only inasmuch as it reflected that sacrifice ■ (cf. Hebrews 11) . But be-' cause the priesthood was satisfied with the reflection, and 168 ! i ! made the law an end in and of itself, thus perverting the j Divine purpose in the law, there arose in Israel a whole new tradition which was in conflict with the priesthood, j and which strove to reestablish the Divine purpose in the law. This tradition, which we have discussed above, was the tradition of the prophets. Although the prophets were persecuted or killed by Old Testament Israel, they came, nevertheless, to be accepted as an authentic and revered part of Hebrew tradition (cf. Acts 7). Just as Christ be came the ultimate high priest, he also became the ultimate i prophet, in that he once and for all established the Divine 1 j purpose in the Old Testament provision. It was also in Christ that God's covenant to Abraham and Israel— 'and by you all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves'— was finally fulfilled. This promise, 1 I which was intended to be a promise of redemption to all men,j had been hoarded by the Jews and enshrined as a national ; treasure. With the death and resurrection of Jesus, the veil, which had for so long shrouded the blessing of re- j demption in Israel, was rent, and the good news (Gospel) of redemption was revealed to Jew and Gentile alike. Paul j says, | Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same j are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, fore- i seeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, ! preached before[hand] the gospel unto Abraham, saying, "In thee shall all the nations be blessed," So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham. (Galatians 3:7-9) 169 Jesus plays -the same role in Jerusalem that he does in the New Testament. We have already seen that in Jerusalem, the "Covenant of Priam" is roughly equivalent to the Old Testament Covenant of Law, and that the "Covenant of Jeho vah" is equivalent to the New Testament Covenant of For giveness. We have seen that the only hope for Albion's redemption lies in the forgiveness of sin which is the 'Covenant of Jehovah.' We have also seen that a promise was made to Albion just as a promise was made to Israel, and that both promises provide the possibility of redemp tion for all men. We have seen that, both in the Old Tes tament and in Jerusalem, the promise was misinterpreted and made exclusive. In both cases the price of redemption was rung up as obedience to the law. In both cases this per version of the promise led to eternal death rather than eternal life. Finally, in Jerusalem, just as in the New Testament, the willing self-sacrifice of Jesus once again insured that the promise would have its intended universal effect. Under the redemption which Jesus established by his death and resurrection, all men could be saved, because all men could experience the forgiveness of sin. The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this World But the story of redemption does not stop with the earthly mission of Christ. Without the Apocalypse the Bible would not be complete. Genesis after all starts at 170 the beginning. It is only appropriate that we should also look to the end. Those early promises to Abraham and Jacob were after all not only for a redeemer but also for a spe cial kingdom, and it is at the end of the Bible that the promise of a kingdom is finally realized. It is in Revela tion with the fall of Babylon the great and the advent of the New Jerusalem, the Spiritual Promised Land, the Heav enly Kingdom that God's original vision of a saved land is brought to completion. It is also here in Blake's concep tion of the kingdom that we come to grips with what is per-, haps the central, controlling idea in Jerusalem, and can once again show how close Blake was to what we have called the primitive Christian tradition. Both the Bible and church tradition distinguish two worlds. There is the world, which is ruled by Satan 'the prince of this world,' and the other world, which is God's world— the kingdom of heaven. This concept appears in many forms, under many different names, but always with a defi^ nite polarity between the two worlds. There is the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit, the kingdom of Antichrist and the kingdom of Christ, Egypt and Canaan, the City of man and the City of God, Babylon and Jerusalem. This conception of the kingdom as distinct from the world is already fairly well formed in the proclamations of the Old Testament prophets, particularly in Deutero-Isaiah, where there is a very clear notion of the separation of 171 Israel from Egypt and Babylon, and of its perpetual strug gle with those forces of evil.26 xn the Old Testament, as we have already seen, the flesh pots of Egypt stand as a perpetual temptation, and the armies of Babylon as a per petual threat. Although this conflict finds its ultimate fulfillment in Revelation, in the struggle between the New Jerusalem and Babylon the great, it is present everywhere in the New Testament and particularly in the teachings of Christ. It is implicit in his parable of the tares and the wheat (Matthew 13) and explicit in what has been called his High Priestly Prayer of intercession for his disciples. And now I am no more in the world, but these [the dis ciples] are in the world, and I come to thee. . . . I pray not thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil [one]. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. (John 17:11, 15-16) It is not surprising that a concept which is so perva sive and basic should find a prominent place in every type of Christianity. Not all Christians, however, agree on how these two worlds are related. There are two basic, diver gent theories on their relationship. One view holds that, although the two worlds are different, they are, nonethe- 26priedman, p. 108. "It is proposed to call this teaching [i.e., of the two worlds] 'kingdom theology.' In a certain sense it is a continuation of the teachings of the Old Testament prophets, in the main of Isaiah, where this basic dualism of the two realms already appears." 172 | i less, coexistent and even united under one authority. The j other view claims that they are totally separate and hos tile, that they obey different authorities, and any attempt ; to mitigate this hostility or to accommodate the "kingdom" to the "world" necessarily corrupts the kingdom and consti tutes a victory for the world. These two divergent views become a basic point of division between the official church and primitive Christianity. In official Christianity, the conception of Corpus Christianum, that is, the ideal of building a society in which the ecclesiastical body coincides with the body poli tic, and in which the church dominates the state, became the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire, and in a slightly modified form is the basis of all state churches. After i all, Peter, the rock upon which the Catholic church is | built, carries both the keys to the kingdom and the sword ■ of the state. The official church has as an ideal an em- { j pire in which all the members of the body politic are also members of the body ecclesiastic. But, when all of the j j citizens of the state are also members of the kingdom of ! t God, the distinction between the world and the kingdom is necessarily blurred. In fact, it becomes meaningless. j Therefore, to reassert the distinction which was lost in . j i the real world, the official church postulated the theory of the "true," "invisible" church which is distinct from I i the earthly church. Once the true, invisible church has 173 , been postulated, the distinction between the world and the kingdom can again be asserted. . It should be pointed out that under this theory-the church is still not in conflict with the state, it merely transcends it. This attempt to justify the Constantine Settlement is almost completely without Biblical sanction, and is itself almost meaningless. Whatever concessions to the Biblical conception of the two worlds the official church may have made, it lost the es sential notion of the struggle between the world and the kingdom. Primitive Christianity continually reasserted that this struggle was not only inevitable but necessary and de sirable. As long as the world remained the world and the kingdom remained the kingdom, they would be in mortal com bat. And anyone, they claimed, who tried to alleviate this conflict by negotiation or compromise did not understand the mission of Christ. They maintained that the price of admission into the kingdom was rebirth and the willingness to accept a responsible place in the brotherhood of Christ. By no other means could the world become the kingdom, and certainly not by military conquest. They were wholly com mitted to the notions that the world was ruled by Satan and all the powers of darkness, For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of 174 this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.27 (Ephesians 6:12) and that the kingdom was ruled by Christ, the Son of God, and all the forces of love, forgiveness and redemption. The fact that the official church joined the state in per secuting the citizens of the kingdom was just another bit of conclusive evidence of the all pervading wickedness of the world. Although the citizens of the kingdom live in the world, and although their responsibility is to this world, their orientation and values are totally other. They feel strongly, that in this world they are 'aliens and exiles' (I Peter 2:9). This conception, which has some times been called 'Kingdom Theology,' is much more than a theology. It implied a whole new set of values, a new con cept of history and a completely new ethic. The Sermon on the Mount stands for the kingdom of God as a kind of con stitution. It became for the spiritual Israel what the Mosaic law was for the physical Israel. The values of the world are the might of the sword held by the arm driven by the will for self assertion and tyranny, tempered only by moral judgment based on legal justice. The values of the kingdom are the power of love made irresistible by self- surrender and sacrifice through mutual forgiveness based on 27The fact that this verse appears as one of the epi graphs to The Four Zoas indicates its importance to Blake. 175 mercy and grace. These are values not easily understood by the unregenerate. The official church tended to see his tory temporally/ as the unending political squabble to es tablish dominions and to capture territory. Primitive Christianity tended to see history in the light of eternity — as the perpetual struggle between the world and the king dom, and they believed in the ultimate triumph of love over might, of self-sacrifice over tyranny and of forgiveness over judgment. The new ethic they saw was that of the brotherhood, which meant more than the sloppy, sentimental notion that all men are good and deserving of filial affec<- tion. They knew that no man was good and were willing to take responsibility for him by bearing his burden of sin in self-sacrifice, to be redemptive and to love and forgive him. How easily Blake's Jerusalem fits into this second tradition should now be evident. Blake also makes a clear distinction between the 'Saviour's Kingdom1 (Jerusalem 3, prose) and the 'Earthly Kingdom' (Jerusalem 85:30). His vision of the corruption of the 'Earthly Kingdom' is also unerring. In Jerusalem as in the Bible, it is ruled by Satan. . . . the Spectre of Albion: he is the Great Selfhood, Satan, Worship'd as God by the Mighty Ones of the Earth. (Jerusalem 33:17-18) 176 Man must & will have Some Religion: if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan & will erect the Synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of this World, God, and destroying all who do not wor ship Satan under the Name of God. (Jerusalem 52, prose) There are many other passages in Jerusalem which suggest that Blake clearly distinguished between the two worlds. In fact the idea of the two worlds is basic to the whole poem, and Blake never makes the slightest effort to blur the distinctions or mitigate the differences. It is just the opposite. Los's whole energy and creative power is concentrated in an effort to make the forces of evil reveal themselves in all their hideous ugliness so that Albion might see the objects of his worship for what they are. At the end of the poem the prince of this world, Satan, the Antichrist is revealed as the Covering Cherub and is rer jected by Albion. As we have already implied there is a parallel between the conflict of the kingdom with the world and the conflict of Israel with Babylon. This Old Testament conflict be-r comes a conventional metaphor in the New Testament and is finally resolved with the victory of the New Jerusalem over Babylon the Great in Revelation. It is usually in these terms that Blake sees the conflict between the world and the kingdom. In Jerusalem, Albion has a clear choice. It is between Vala/Rahab the Whore of Babylon and Jerusalem the bride of the Lamb. On the one hand there is the 177 Spectre of Luvah called variously the Reactor, Satan, the Antichrist and the Covering Cherub, who operates through Vala and the spectrous sons and daughters of Albion to keep Albion under the bondage of moral law in the religion of sexual chastity. On the other hand there is Jesus, the Lamb of God, the Voice Divine, the Savior and Lord, who works through Los the prophet and his sons to free Albion- of his delusion and turn him to the person of Jerusalem who stands for liberty and the religion of Jesus which is per petual forgiveness of sins and self-sacrifice. At the end of Jerusalem just as in Revelation, Satan and Babylon are defeated and Jesus and his bride, Jerusalem, are triumphant. Albion is redeemed, and the kingdom of God is established. If Blake accepted the kingdom theology of primitive Christianity, he also accepted its values, its view of his tory and its ethic. Blake's acceptance of the values of love, self-sacrifice and forgiveness has already been sug gested in the discussion of the new covenant. The view of history as the perpetual struggle between the forces of darkness and light between the world and the kingdom, is everywhere implied in his adoption of the redemptive his tory of the Bible as the type for all history. The concept of the brotherhood as ethic, which is present everywhere in Jerusalem, has not yet been touched in this study and has been largely ignored by the critics. Near the ve^y begin ning of Jerusalem, after the fall of Albion, Hand and Hyle^ • 178 the spectrous sons of Albion exult oyer the death of love, forgiveness and brotherhood in Albion. "Cast, Cast ye Jerusalem forthJ The Shadow of delusions! "The Harlot daughter! Mother of pity and dishonourable forgiveness! "Our Father Albion's sin and shame! But father now no more, "Nor sons, nor hateful peace & love, nor soft complacencies, "With transgressors meeting in brotherhood around the table "Or in the porch or garden." (Jerusalem 18:11-16) As a result of his fall Albion bends ‘the fibers of Broth erhood . . . in Feminine Allegories' (Jerusalem 30:18). In plate eighty-eight, when Los is in conflict with his emana tion Enitharmon who refuses to accept his dominion, he tries to win her by describing the joy of brotherhood. "When Souls mingle & join thro' all the Fibers of Brotherhood "Can there be any secret joy on Earth greater than this?" (Jerusalem 88:14-15) Enitharmon refuses to acknowledge the beauty of brotherhood and offers instead the sexual religion and the feminine tabernacle. Near the very end of the poem, when Albion has come far enough to cry out to the 'Divine Creator & Re deemer' to save him from his selfhood, Jesus replied: "Fear not Albion: Unless I die thou canst not live; "But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me. "This is Friendship & Brotherhood; without it Man is Not." (Jerusalem 96:14-16) 179 Albion finds this hard to accept because brotherhood impli.es self-sacrifice and forgiveness, but he submits to Christ and is redeemed. Once again, brotherhood is much more than sentiment. Brotherhood is what Jesus established on the cross, and those who would experience brotherhood must go the way of the cross as well. Theology in the more formal sense of the word is more explicit in the Pauline Epistles than in the Gospels. The parables and deeds of Christ do not lend themselves to the kind of regimented system that the Pauline writings do. It is possible, nevertheless, to speak of two traditions in the New Testament. There is the Pauline tradition, elabo rated by Augustine and Aquinas, which has become the bul wark of the official church throughout the centuries, and there is what has sometimes been called the Synoptic tradi tion, which is not as dogmatic or rigid and has been largely kept alive by primitive Christianity.^® There are also in the New Testament, corresponding to the two theo logical traditions, two views of the nature of the kingdom of God. The first view holds that the kingdom of God is already present in every reborn Christian. As Christ says, '"Behold, the kingdom of God is within you"' (Luke 17:20). This view is to be found primarily in the Gospels, and al though it is also present in the Pauline Epistles and in 28priedman, pp. 107-108. 180 i i Revelation, a different vision of the kingdom seems to dom- j i j inate those works. In them, the kingdom is held to be im minent, but still in the future. This emphasizes the king dom which is experienced by every Christian after death or at the time of the second coming of Christ. This second view, which emphasizes the eschatalogical kingdom, is also found in the Gospels, but it has none of the importance in the Gospels that it does in the Pauline tradition. As might be expected, primitive Christianity, which tended to go back farther than the official churches, which in fact, "tended to neglect Paul and push back to Jesus,"29 empha sized the importance of the kingdom which is already pres ent in every member of the brotherhood, while the official church tended to champion the eschatalogical kingdom. In Jerusalem, the emphasis also falls on the present realization of the kingdom. John Middleton Murry in his I t rather uninteresting book on William Blake, makes an ex tremely ambiguous statement on Blake's view of the estab lishment of the kingdom. But it will be useful to quote i him at length. ! Thus the inward revolution in the individual leads straight to the expectation of a revolution in the world of men. For a world of men in which this simple and 29Friedman, p. 105. "The Anabaptists went back fur ther than any of the other groups [of the Reformation]. They tended even to neglect Paul and push back to Jesus." An excerpt from a letter written by Roland H. Bainton to Robert Friedman. 181 i I natural change— this 'cleansing of the doors of percept i tion', as Blake was to call it presently— had become | universal, would evidently be a changed world. And this, ; I believe, is the real meaning of Jesus's saying that 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you'. It does not mean merely that to turn inward is the way to discover the \ Kingdom. It means that, but it means more? it means that if all men would seek first the Kingdom within them-- which he did not think was really difficult: 'Seek and ye shall find: knock and it shall be opened'— then the ! Kingdom of Heaven would be on earth also. The teaching j of Jesus is the combination, in one simple and vital unity, of the inward and outward. It is the teaching that the key to the outward Kingdom will be found by the inward man. The happening of the inward revolution brings with it inevitably, the expectation of a revolution in the world ; of men. It does not happen, and there are very good rea- ! sons why it does not happen: the chief being that men | cannot forsake father and mothers and wives and children, ; but must labor to keep them and themselves alive. And until we see to it that it is really possible for men as individuals to 'take no thought for the morrow: what ye shall eat and what ye shall drink', they will be, except j in rare instances, incapable of the revolution which the i Divine Vision demands.30 ! i It must be granted that Mr. Murry is here speaking of The i French Revolution and not of Jerusalem, but it is neverthe- j 1 less unfortunate that after hitting the mark so squarely in I i his analysis of the relationship between the inward and the j | outward, he should miss the mark by so much in his second i i I paragraph. The revolution which the Divine Vision demands j 1 is Self-Sacrifice and Self Annihilation, and what have they I i ! to do with the availability of food and raiment. It seems i I that here is a classic example of the Corporeal Understand- | i ing. The man of vision, and we have the perfect example in j 30Murry, pp. 53-54. 182 Blake who refused to compromise his vision for the sake of food or raiment, pays little heed to material limitations if they stand in the way of obedience. But what is more to j i the point, and here Mr. Murry is right only in his estima tion of the Early Blake, it becomes clear that by 'a revo- f lution in the world of men' Murry has Ore, the spirit of armed revolt, in mind. He is saying that personal redempr' | tion must lead to social revolution. Such a revolution would bring about a kingdom of sorts, but with Ore as leader it damns the world to the perpetual cycle of tyranny and revolution. Like the Phoenix bird, each new kingdom will rise out of the ashes of the old, only to burn and j I rise again. In Jerusalem, I am confident, this is not the\ case. Not only does Blake have a different conception of | redemption in mind, he no longer looks for social and po- ! litical revolution which holds as its ideal the establish ment of a better earthly kingdom. The kingdom which Blake | I has in mind in Jerusalem is of another sort. He has come j to realize that the kingdom must be first and foremost an i individual experience. That is, the 'kingdom within' comes first. Secondly, he has come to see that as long as there is one man in the world who is not reborn, who does not | have the kingdom of God within him, that is, as long as j i i there is one man who does not live by the power of love, j self-sacrifice and forgiveness, there will always be tyr anny and cruel war. It is the natural instinct for man to 183 deify his spectre and to fall under its dominion. The spectre is the will to self-assertion and self-righteous ness. Thus it is natural for man under the dominion of his spectre to seek after tyrannical power. The only way to overcome the spectre is by self annihilation and surrender to the power of love and brotherhood. The process is very complex. But Albion is both man and nation. Therefore, the redemption of Albion at the end of Jerusalem is the redemption of both the individual and the nation. It is significant that the redemption is not brought about by revolt, but by the real sacrificial death of Jesus in which death Albion partakes. And through the principle of the inward and the outward, that Murry speaks of, and through the principle of the relationship of the one and many, the redemption of Albion the individual becomes the redemption of the land. The redeemed Albion, just as the redeemed Israel, is the community of all those who have been faithful to the new covenant, the religion of Jesus. This is the biblical conception of the saved land, of the spiritual Israel made up of all the faithful of all the world. That there is a vision in Jerusalem of the es chatalogical kingdom which shall be established at the end of time when Satan the Antichrist shall be finally over thrown, cannot be denied. But just as in primitive Chris tianity, the emphasis in Jerusalem is rather on the present 184 immediate realization of the ‘Saviour's Kingdom' in every person. CHAPTER III MAN, CHRIST, AND REDEMPTION The Conflict: Epistemology or Ontology It is quite possible that Blake's vision, as presented in Jerusalem, might correspond with the Bible and with the tenets of primitive Christianity in the matters which I have already discussed, and that it might still not be es sentially Christian. There are three central issues which stand as a crucial test in determining the limits of Chris tianity. Unless we can demonstrate that Blake's views on Anthropology, Christology and Soteriology are in essential agreement with the views of the Bible on these matters, we cannot finally make the claim that the Jerusalem vision is a Christian vision. That is, what finally, in Jerusalem, is Blake's view of the nature of man, the nature of Christ, and the nature of salvation? If we cannot demonstrate es sential agreement here, everything else we have said turns out to be nothing but interesting similarities. The Bible is clear in its assertion that man was cre ated by God and, therefore, that he is a creature. But it also teaches that man was created perfect with the ability to live in perfect harmony with himself and with nature. In short, man was created in the image and likeness of God 185 186 and therefore shared in at least some of the characteris tics of his creator. However, the Bible is also quite spe- i cific in its assertion that man fell from his perfection j j through his own volition and that in the fall something i happened to alter the nature of man, so that, it was no j I longer possible for man to live in unity and harmony with j himself, with nature or with God. In fact, there is at i least one tradition which claims that nature itself suf- j i fered a fall in the fall of man. The fall, in Christianity,; then, would seem to be ontological. That is, there was an actual change in nature or being. It is also generally j I agreed that the cause of man's fall was sin. What sin is, j and which sin caused man to fall is a matter of debate | i j among theologians. But almost all agree that in some way [ j man stepped beyond his bounds and appropriated prerogatives j to himself that were not rightfully his. This sin is called variously pride or selfishness and is frequently identified with some breach in normal harmonious sexual re lationships. There can be little doubt that Blake also believed in the primeval innocence of man. In eternity (and "eternity" always has qualitative rather than quantitative value for Blake) man lived in a state of unity and harmony with him self and with the whole universe. At some point, however, man fell from his primeval innocence and thus fell at odds with himself and the world. In short, the unity and har- 187 mony disintegrated and man tended towards chaos. So far there is very little conflict between Blake's view of man and the Bible's. But Blake scholars have usually identi fied the cause of the fall as something other than sin, and the result of the fall as something different, from a change in nature. It is usually asserted that man fell because he suffered a fall in perception. That is, man fell because he came to be satisfied to see himself as fallen. Passages like the following from The Four Zoas (and there are many others like it in Blake) are given in support of such a view: "Refusing to behold the Divine Image which all behold "And live thereby, he [man] is sunk down into a deadly sleep." (1:283-284)[italics mine] The fall, for Blake then, seems to be epistemological rather than ontological. There is no fall in nature, merely a refusal to know or acknowledge the perfection or divinity; which is eternally and universally present in man. Man for Blake, so say the critics, has fallen under the power of an illusion and now sees his humanity, which is actually per-^ ! feet, as imperfect and sinful. Man has not lost his essen-| tial goodness; he has simply failed to recognize it. There is obviously considerable disparity between this view of man and the view of man in the Bible. However, the ultimate test of the orthodoxy (I use the word with hesitancy) of any Christian must be his Chris- I 188 tology. The first claim the New Testament makes, for Christ is that he is God incarnated in man. There is also fairly clear evidence throughout the New Testament that we should not interpret the incarnation to mean either that God is man or that man is God. Christ is simultaneously both fully, God and fully man. As such he suffers the liabilities of man's fallen nature and transcends that nature to redeem it. In fact, the notion of Christ as both man and God offers the possibility for man to achieve his original perfection, and it offers the possibility for the harmonious reunion of man and God, and man and Nature. There can be little doubt that the New Testament teaches that Christ is both man and more than man or "other" than man. The usual interpretation of Blake's view of Christ differs considerably. Most critics assume that for Blake, Christ is not more than man; he is simply .more man.'*’ Christ is not "other" in any way. God is immanent and per fect humanity. Christ is God only in the sense that he is the great example of human perfection. He is the fully human, the "Divine Humanity" and the "Human Imagination Divine." Passages like the following from The Everlasting Gospel are often quoted for support; ■*■1 have outlined the critic's interpretation of Blake's view of Christ at some length in part three of this chapter. 189 And when he [Jesus] humbled himself to God,. Then descended the cruel rod. | "If thou humblest thyself, thou humblest me; "Thou also dwelst in Eternity. j "Thou art a Man, God is no more, 'Thine own Humanity learn to Adore." (K. 750) ! i Once again there is little doubt that there is little simi- ; i larity between such a statement and the vision of Christ i presented in the New Testament. And these objections to Blake's Christianity cannot be explained away. ! Since Soteriology is necessarily dependent on Anthro- i pology and on Christology, the usual Christian position on ! salvation and the usual Blakeian position on salvation must i also be at odds. If, for the Christian, the fall of man is ! [ ontological, then his redemption must also be ontoloqical. That is, in order to be saved, man requires a new nature or j being. He needs to be made over into something "other" i i I than what he now is. It would seem logical that if man must be made over into something "other," he needs someone \ i "other" to make him over. The concepts of a fallen nature and a redeemed nature, then, go hand-in-hand with the con cept of a Christ who is both man and God. This act of transforming man from what he is to what he should be is accomplished by the death of the old nature and the resur- j rection of a new. But the death and resurrection of man is j i ] dependent on the death and resurrection of Christ. On the one hand, man's death and resurrection needs the death and 190 resurrection of Christ to give it significance. On the other hand, Christ's death and resurrection cannot be claimed unless man also has experienced the death and res urrection. In other words, salvation for the Christian is a self-sacrifice patterned after, and demanded by, the self- sacrifice of Christ. Just as Christ died, thus destroying the necessity for life in the old man, and rose again, thus making possible life in the new man, so each Christian is called to die in Christ to the old and rise again in Christ to the new. Paul makes this very clear: For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his res urrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, . . . Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him: . . . Likewise reckon ye also your selves to be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 4:22-24) This act clearly involves an actual change of being. And the demand of this transformation is an "actual" death. There can be little doubt that salvation, in the New Testa ment, is ontological. Once again, according to the usual interpretation, this would not seem to be true of Blake. Since the fall has only been epistemological, the redemption need only be epistemological. There is no need for a new nature because man's perfect nature has never been ruined. The new man, or at any rate Blake's equivalent of the Christian new man, has been there all along. The problem is that man has 191 allowed his powers of perception to be limited, and thus he i has ceased to perceive himself for what he really is. Re- \ i demption then is merely a matter of expanded perception— of j i a new vision. And it is Christ who maintains and provides man with this vision. If it is true that these motions of man, Christ and ! redemption predominate in Jerusalem, it will be extremely i difficult to make a valid case for Blake's Christianity without either twisting Blake's views or the biblical evi dence. Both have been tried. In fact if these distinc tions hold for Jerusalem, it would only be honest to assert I j along with most of Blake's critics, that Blake is no Chris- j tian. One of the most forthright and uncharitable expres- i sions of the view that Blake is no Christian is made by j j Harold Bloom. It is interesting to note that Bloom comes very close to the odd position that Christianity is not Christianity and if it is, Christians are still not Chris tians. I give you his statement in full, not with any view j i to direct refutation, but merely because it presents dra matically the basic conflict of this chapter. He says, To annihilate the Selfhood is to emulate Blake's Milton by washing off the Not Human, to cast off the rotten rags of every covenanted religion, and indeed to liberate the spirit from every convention of belief, every shred of institutional or historical Christianity. Many of | Blake's best and most devoted critics have sought to mitigate the completeness of Blake's rejection here, but thy ought to remain on their Beulah-couches without seeking to have their master join them in that soft re pose. If Blake is a Christian (and he insisted always that he was) then the vast majority of Christians are 192 not. . . . Blake identified the fully liberated Imagina tion with the Holy Ghost; such an identification makes Isaiah or Shelley or Yeats or any man set free into his full creative potential a Christian, whether he thinks himself one or not. . . . If the theologians of the dif ferent Christian orthodoxies are true Christians, then Blake is not, and it seems more accurate to name him an apocalyptic humanist than a Christian, little as he would have liked such a classification.2 I am certain that Blake would not have liked such a classi fication. It would seem that Blake has demonstrated him self to be a careful and precise thinker. We have already demonstrated his thorough knowledge of the Bible— in fact, his lifelong preoccupation with it. When he claims to be a Christian, we must assume that the name Christian has some real definable meaning and we must at least give that claim fair consideration. Not to do so, to dismiss Blake's claim as easily as Bloom has done, displays the kind of reverence without real respect which has characterized much recent criticism of our great writers. It is my intention to take Blake's claim seriously. And this study is partly an attempt to save Blake from such a classification— one which he has suffered from too long. It is my contention that the Jerusalem vision is essen tially a Christian vision. The critics’ objections which I have presented above are. weighty and cannot be lightly dismissed. But I think they can be explained without ^Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City, New York, 1963) , pp. 371-372. 193 explaining them away. Partly I think they are misconcep tions when applied to Jerusalem. They are misconceptions which arise partly from a misplaced emphasis and partly j t from the faulty habit of reading all of Blake's works as a unity. The habit, I think, has usually been to extract the | j cosmology from The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, and the point j of view from the books of the revolutionary period, and to i weld them together into a single whole— reading the cosmol- , i ogy of the late books into the early, and the point of view j \ of the early, into the late. It is my contention that by ! the time we come to Jerusalem, both the cosmology and the " I i point of view have undergone several basic changes. It is j not my intention to trace these changes through Blake's work. It is rather my intention to discover what the point ! of view in Jerusalem is, and to draw comparisons and con- j trasts with the earlier books only when it is useful to the understanding of Jerusalem. It would not seem to be faulty j ! methodology to use Jerusalem as its own standard of judg ment and interpretation— to consider it as an autonomous work of art which has its own unique purpose and makes its own demands on itself and on its reader. Man and the Fall I I Since Jerusalem begins with Albion already fallen, and with Jerusalem in ruins, we cannot be as concerned with the nature of Albion before the fall as with the nature of the 194 fall and the nature of Albion after the fall. At the same time, the major preoccupation in Jerusalem is with the re- ' demption of Albion, and in order to understand how Albion | i is redeemed, we must have some knowledge of what he is re- ' deemed from. i i Blake came back to the story of the fall repeatedly inj almost all of his works. It was one of his major preoccu- j pations. Even in the first edition of Songs of Innocence, which supposedly dealt with the pre-fallen condition of man,! there were poems like "The Little Boy Lost-"The Little Boy ; Found" and "The Little Girl Lost"-"The Little Girl Found," j which dealt more or less explicitly with the fall. The i "Little Girl" poems were later transferred to Songs of Ex perience , where they rightfully belong. Many of the other ! poems in Songs of Innocence either anticipate the fall or employ it like a backdrop against which to test and explore the state of innocence.^ in Songs of Experience, which was i issued in 1794, five years after Songs of Innocence, the j i i fall is the central controlling idea. All the minor proph-j I ecies (with the exception of the explicitly political The j j French Revolution, America and Europe) in some form or other contain accounts of the fall. Even America and 3"Infant Joy" and "Nurse's Song" are examples of the first, "The Chimney Sweeper," "Holy Thursday" and "The Little Black Boy" are examples of the second, while '-'The Echoing Green" has elements of both. 195 Europe have "Preludiums" which relate the political con flict to the cosmic fall. And the last three great prophe cies , The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, all deal with the fall explicitly and at some length. In fact, in each case the fall sets the drama of the poems in motion. But Blake's accounts of the fall vary greatly. It is given in different ways and from different points of view in each of the works. Mot one agrees exactly with the others, at least in the cosmology of the fall. In spite of this, the vast majority of Blake's critics have worked un^- der the assumption that all of Blake's works are basically of a piece— that the differences in the works should be ac counted for on the basis of an expansion or consolidation of vision rather than a change of vision. It must be ad mitted that such an approach has provided astounding re sults. In fact, it led to the first real breakthrough in the understanding of Blake's complex cosmology. Conse quently, critics such as Hazard Adams (A Reading of the Shorter Poems), ^ Robert P. Gleckner (The Piper and the Bard)Harold Bloom (Blake's Apocalypse), Northrop Frye (Fearful Symmetry),6 S. Foster Damon (The Philosophy and Symbols,^ the earliest and in some ways the source of all ^(Seattle, 1963), pp. 3-74. ^(Detroit, Michigan, 1959), pp. 33-83. ®(Boston, 1947), passim. ?(New York, 1924), passim. 4 the others) and a score of others have devised a system I based on Blake's various accounts of the fall that more or j less fits and explains them all. The system runs something j i like this: The Giant Albion, who is the primeval, Univer sal Man, contains within himself four principals which are | named Urthona, Urizen, Luvah and Thramas. These four, j called either the Four Zoas (from the Greek plural zoa, "living creatures") or the Four Eternals, may be inter preted cosmologically, psychologically or historically. Psychologically, they stand for the Imagination, the Reason,j the Passions or Emotions and the Bodily Instincts respec- tively. In eternity they all lived in harmonious opposi^- j tion in Albion. Each had his equal place; each had his task. None tried to dominate; none allowed himself to be dominated. Out of the friendly opposition between them arose a perception that was infinite and a life of creative | t joy that was eternal. And because Albion contained in him-j i i self all things, and was in harmony with himself, he was in ! i i unity and harmony with everything, and everything obeyed j | the eternal order. j However, at some point in eternity, the Eternals be- j came dissatisfied with an order based on opposition and j sought to mitigate the opposition and fix the relationships by dominating each other. The responsibility for this j I breach in the eternal order, which constitutes the fall, Blake assigns to different Eternals in different works, but 197 most often he puts the blame on Urizen. Ironically, this breach in the eternal cosmic order, which was intended to lead to permanence, led instead to division and chaos. The Zoas began to divide and subdivide. The friendly opposi tion turned into open warfare. Albion moved slowly toward complete chaos. A whole host of new mythological charac ters, the off-shoots of the original Zoas, began to emerge: Los and Enitharmon from Urthona, Ahania from Urizen, Vala and Rahab from Luvah, and so on. In order to counteract the complete chaos which was fast approaching, Los, the son, or fallen form of Urthona, created the material universe which established a rigid permanence and arrested the pro cess of division and subdivision which was fast leading to total chaos. However, the effect of material creation was to severely limit man's powers of perception. Creation, then, was a mercy because it kept man from falling into complete and eternal chaos, but it was a cruelty because it limited man's powers. In any case, it is an evidence of the fall. This is only the barest outline of the very complex system which the critics have deduced from Blake's works. The whole system can be found in much greater detail in al most any work on Blake. It has become something of a stan dard interpretation. I introduce it briefly, merely to show how I understand the standard view and to show how it has led the critics into error when interpreting Jerusalem. 19 8 The primary source for this complete cosmology of the fall (all the minor prophecies present only aspects of it) is The Four Zoas— ironically/ the very place Blake begins to reject it. However, this version of the fall does not completely disappear after The Four Zoas. Vestiges of it appear in both Milton and Jerusalem. In fact, there are several accounts of the fall in Jerusalem which resemble the system remarkably. I give several examples: And the Four Zoas clouded rage East & West & North & South? They change their situations in the Universal Man. Albion groans, he sees the Elements divide before his face, And England, who is Brittannia, divided into Jerusalem & Vala; And Urizen assumes the East, Luvah assumes the South, In his dark Spectre ravening from his open Sepulcher. And the Four Zoas, who are the Four Eternal Senses of Man, Become Four Elements separated from the Limbs of Albion: (36:25-32) For Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic: One to the North, Urthona: One to the South Urizen: One to the East, Luvah: One to the West, Tharmas, They are the Four Zoas that stood around the Throne Divine, Verulam, London, York & Edinburgh, their English names. But when Luvah assumed the World of Urizen Southward And Albion was slain upon his Mountains & in his Tent, 199 | All fell towards the Center, sinking down- I wards in dire ruin. | In the South remains a burning Fire: in the ; East, a Void: In the West, a World of raging Waters; in j the North solid Darkness ! Unfathomable without end; but in the midst of these Is Built eternally the sublime Universe of Los & Enitharmon. (59:10-21) The Four Zoas clouded rage. Urizen stood by Albion With Rinthra and Palamaboron and Theotormon and Bromion: These four are Verulam & London & York & Edinburgh. And the Four Zoas are Urizen & Luvah & Tharmas & Urthona: In opposition deadly, and their wheels in poisonous ! And deadly stupor turn'd against each other, loud & fierce, Entering into the Reasoning Power, forsaking Imagination, They became Spectres, and their Human Bodies were reposed In Beulah by the Daughters of Beulah with tears & Lamentation. (74:1-9) | Although there is agreement between these passages, ; there are also numerous differences. In the first passage j it seems to be Urizen who usurps the place of Luvah, In | the second, Luvah is the villain. In the second passage the Four Zoas are given the English names. In the third, j it is the four sons of Urizen. Essentially, however, they | l all agree, and when taken together, they agree with the i view of the fall presented above. Furthermore, when iso- ! i lated from the rest of the work, they would seem to suggest that the fall of Albion in Jerusalem accords with the 200 j i accepted view of the fall in Blake criticism. j j However, there is a rather radical shift in the impor- j i tance of the Four Zoas from The Four Zoas to Jerusalem. We i j have already demonstrated that Ore, who plays a rather im- ! portant role in The Four Zoas, has almost disappeared from j | Jerusalem. The same has happened to the Four Zoas. As we shall soon see, the statistics on this matter are striking. Three of the Four Zoas have been greatly diminished in im portance. Their role in Jerusalem seems to be largely per- : functory, or at least, only supportive. The fourth, who also plays a lesser role, has changed in significance and plays a different role.** | The critics have made a great deal of the fact that the structure and point of view of Jerusalem are very simi- : j lar to the structure and point of view of The Four Zoas. , Frye says, "the structure of Jerusalem does not greatly j differ from that of The Four Zoas."9 He then goes on to j trace what he thinks is the structure of Jerusalem and to show its almost exact correspondence to the structure of | The Four Zoas, making it abundantly clear that he also j i i 8Edward J. Rose ("The Structure of Blake's Jerusalem," j Bucknell Review, IX [May, 1963], 35-54) who has attempted j to show that Jerusalem is neatly structured around the Four j Zoas, has failed to notice that they have all but vanished j from Jerusalem. For a short summary and analysis of Mr. Rose's argument cf. Appendix I. ! 8Fearful Symmetry, p. 357. 201 • i considers the subject matter and point of view of the two j I poems to be similar. He explains the failure of The Four Zoas on the basis of Blake's overemphasis on the apocalypse,! and the success of Jerusalem on his fortuitous control of the apocalypse. There is, I think, a more satisfying ex- i planation for the failure of The Four Zoas and the success of Jerusalem. It should be expected that in a poem which bears the title Vala or The Four Zoas the major actors would be Vala and the Four Zoas. It should also be expected that in a poem which bears the title Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, the major characters would be Jerusalem and i Albion. Such an observation might appear too obvious to bear mentioning, but when we look at the poems from this vantage point, some very significant differences reveal 1 J themselves. And strangely, it is a point which has too long been ignored by Blake's critics. Although word counts never provide very conclusive evidence, it would seem that i counting the number of times a name appears in a work should at least suggest how important a character is in that work. When we tabulate the names in The Four Zoas andj i Jerusalem, we find that two very different sets of charac- j i ters assume importance in the two works. In fact, they are j so different that they would seem to indicate that some- ! thing very different is going on in the poems^ It should be noted before we present our evidence that 202 all of the major characters and many of the minor charac- i ters appear in both poems, but they appear in vastly dif- i ferent proportions. Taken all together, the names of the i j Pour Zoas— Urthona, Urizen, Tharmas and Luvah— -appear in The Four Zoas 573 times and in Jerusalem only 116 times. If we exclude Luvah, who plays a different role in Jerusa lem than in The Four Zoas (although he still appears twice as often in The Four Zoas as in Jerusalem— 140 to 63 times),, the contrast is still more striking. The proportions then are 433 to 48— a little less than ten times as often in The Four Zoas as in Jerusalem. Of the three, Urizen appears 240 times, Urthona 74 times and Tharmas 119 times in The ! Four Zoas, whereas in Jerusalem Urizen appears only 22 1 “ - i times, Urthona 15 times, and Tharmas a mere 11. If we add to this roster Vala and the minor characters, Ore, Enithar-! mon and Ahania, we have a grand total of 946 appearances in ] The Four Zoas and 244 appearances in Jerusalem. Even Vala,| i who plays an important role in both poems, appears more often in The Four Zoas than in Jerusalem— 112 to 90 times. I ' — — I | The four major characters in Jerusalem are Albion, j Jerusalem, Jesus and Los. All of them appear in The Four j Zoas, but they all appear much more frequently in Jerusalem.! ! The most striking change is in Albion. In The Four Zoas as; 1 in Jerusalem, Albion is Universal Man. However, in The j I Four Zoas, his fall and redemption are traced largely j through the conflict, division and reunion of the Four 203 | Eternals. There, for all practical purposes, he is a mere j abstraction, and although in one sense the whole poem is about him, he is a very minor allegorical figure--almost not a character at all— certainly not a person. In The Four Zoas, it is the Eternals who are the living, breathing, struggling characters, and who claim all our attention. In Jerusalem, all this has changed. There we come upon Albion as a character of real substance. Our attention is now held by Albion himself, and although the Eternals still ap pear, they have been reduced to the level of mere forms. ; It is then not surprising to discover that if Albion's name : appears only 24 times in The Four Zoas, it appears 535 times in Jerusalem— about 21 times as often. The case of Jerusa lem is almost as striking. While she appears only 32 times in The Four Zoas, she appears 232 times in Jerusalem--seven times as often. The various names which Blake uses to des- j ignate Jesus appear only half as often in The Four Zoas as in Jerusalem— 125 to 254 times. The case for Los is not so | striking, but it is significant enough to support the trend.: He appears only 184 times in The Four Zoas and 215 times in ■ Jerusalem. When we add up the. figures for these four char acters as we did for those who predominate in The Four Zoas,. we see a truly overwhelming difference. These four names appear in Jerusalem 1,236 times, and only 365 times in The 204 Four Zoas.10 The method of representing Albion's internal conflict has also changed in Jerusalem. In The Four Zoas, Blake de pends on the Four Zoas to portray the internal conflict of Albion. In Jerusalem, he depends almost completely on what he calls the Spectre and the Emanation. As the Spectre and the Emanation are separated from Albion, he falls. As they are reunited with him, he is redeemed. Albion's Emanation is Jerusalem; his Spectre is frequently identified with Luvah, among others. (This accounts for the fact that Luvah*s name appears proportionally more frequently in Je rusalem than the other Zoas'.) Consequently, we might sus pect that the number of uses of Spectre and Emanation in Jerusalem would also be greater than in The Four Zoas— as in fact it is. The word Spectre appears 90 times in The Four Zoas and 141 times in Jerusalem. Emanation appears only 14 times in The Four Zoas and 91 times in Jerusalem. E. D. Hirsch, Jr.H is one of the few Blake critics 10Although I have also included the various synonyms for the names of these characters in these statistics, I have avoided such things as the number of times a character actually speaks or acts. I am confident, however, that such a tabulation would only add strength to my argument. I should add that A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake, ed., David V. Erdman (Ithaca, New York, 1967) , was an invaluable aid in compiling these statistics, in fact, in every part of this study. ^ Innocence and Experience, cf. particularly Appendix IV, pp. 325-338. 205 who is committed to the notion that Blake made several ba sic changes in thought during his career. I am convinced that he is right, although I am not so convinced that he identified the changes correctly. He divides Blake's po etic career into nine periods (which he has outlined very plainly in an appendix at the end of his book). Generally speaking, he sees a movement from the early pastoral inno cence of Poetical Sketches; to the genuinely religious in nocence of Songs of Innocence; to the naturalism of Songs of Experience, most of the minor prophecies and the early versions of The Four Zoas; through a period of disillusion ment in The Book of Los and The Book of Ahania; to a final return to a genuine religious innocence in the last revi sions of The Four Zoas and in Milton; with a final consoli dation in Jerusalem. Mr. Hirsch's categories are, I be lieve, too specific, and at times his definitions of the categories are slanted in such a way that he is forced to twist the interpretations of the works to make them fit. Nevertheless, his categories do seem to come directly out of his investigation of the works, and his point of view allows him to make many fresh and important observations. One, which sheds light on our present discussion, seems to me particularly astute. Apropos of the reason why Blake never finished The Four Zoas even after two or three revi sions, Mr. Hirsch says, "The poem was about the four Zoas, 206 I ; i but Blake was no longer interested in two of them."-*-2 ! The signs of this disenchantment with two of the Zoas appear as early as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The two major opposing forces— Blake calls them "Contraries"— in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are given many different names, but basically they are Reason or Form on the one j hand, and Imagination or Energy on the other. In Blake's expanded system, which really did not fully evolve until The Four Zoas (where he also rejected it), these two forces ; are more or less exactly represented by Urizen and Urthona (or his sons Los and Ore). In fact, throughout all the minor prophecies the central conflict is always between these two forces. The system of the Four Zoas does not really even appear until The Four Zoas. Of the four, ; Tharmas does not appear anywhere in Blake's works until The j j Four Zoas. Luvah has only one insignificant appearance in Thel, and Urthona appears only twice in the "Preludium" to ; America and once in the fourth plate of Europe. It seems fair to assert that the four-fold system is not nearly so ; important to Blake's works as it has been made out to be. ! j It is important only to The Four Zoas, where it was devised j and which it undid. When it is read into the earlier works j ] it distorts badly. The remnant of it in Jerusalem is one of the factors which confuses and disrupts the movement of ► ! 12Hirsch, Jr., p. 144. i 207 the poem. Blake has, I think, failed to integrate it into the drama of the poem.-*-** And it is fair to speculate that Blake would have rid his poetry of the Four Zoas completely if he had continued to write "major prophecies" after Jeru- ! salem. In fact, in the few unfinished poems which succeed i j Jerusalem, there is not a shred of the Four Zoas left. In j them Blake turns to a much simpler and more conventional \ religio-biblical language— a direction he had begun to take ! i in Jerusalem. ! It is much more useful to think of two opposing forces:! Reason and Imagination, or Form and Energy. In Jerusalem, j these two forces are almost exact equivalents of the Spec-?- 1 i tre and the Emanation respectively. The separation of both i ; i or either of these principles from Albion leads to their ! i domination of him. And the domination of either or both of j them produces the Selfhood which constitutes the fall.- * * 4 i It seems to me that all of these very substantial dif ferences between Jerusalem and The Four Zoas implies a sub-?- stantial difference in Blake's concept of man and of the l^john Beer, Blake's Humanism (New York, 1968). It is Blake's notion of the contraries that forms one of the ba sic points in Mr. Beer's attempt to demonstrate Blake's ihumanism. The work is seriously weakened, however, (and it demonstrates the limitation of his argument) that Mr. Beer almost completely avoids Jerusalem. 14This system already appears to be operating in Mil- ;ton. A case could be made, I suspect, for the notion that in the later revisions and additions to The Four Zoas the j two systems are in conflict.' 208 fall in the two works. The usual interpretation obviously s has more validity for The Four Zoas than for Jerusalem. | Blake's concepts of man and the fall in Jerusalem and their relationship to the concepts of man and the fall in the Bible we must now discover. j I . To discover exactly the nature of man before the fall, j the nature of his fall, and the nature of man after the ; fall, in the Bible, is difficult. All we are told of man i before the fall is that he was created in the "image" and i "likeness" of God, and that he lived in harmony with God, | I nature and himself. Theologians have speculated at length j about the meaning of those comments. In all honesty, it is | impossible to say just what they mean. But we should ex- | pect the Bible to be silent on the nature of pre-lapsarian man. It is after all God's Word of redemption for fallen man. Consequently it need not concern itself with man be fore the fall. On the one essential point, the Bible is absolutely clear and unambiguous— man is fallen. In fact i the whole thrust of the Bible is to establish a few simple but all-important facts: Man was created by God; he fell; God redeemed him and will be reunited with him. Man fell through his own choice; God created him and redeemed him. 15It might be possible, I suppose, for modern critical theology to argue that these notions are primarily if not exclusively New Testament, and to argue that they are pres ent in the Old Testament only by Christian theological in terpretation. In the light of a Christo-centric approach 209 j As to the fall itself, the Bible is also brief and am biguous. The whole story of the fall is contained in six 1 scant verses in Genesis Chapter 3. Sixteen verses later | man is already out of the Garden of Eden. The whole rest ; of the Bible (when viewed from the perspective of the New ! Testament) is the account of how man gets back to Eden. In! fact, even before man is expelled, God has already sug-> j gested the way in which he will return.-*-® Twenty^-four j short verses, then, serve as the raison d'etre for the ; i whole rest of the Bible. But theologians have not taken i their cue from this biblical silence. The fall (with its j i attendant questions, such as the origin of evil and its en-i i try into the world) has been one of the most divisive ques-j i i tions in Christianity. It is difficult to say anything j about the fall without raising up an army of opponents. However, without getting embroiled in that controversy, ; there are some points which can be inferred with consider able safety. First, although man was in a position where it was possible for him not to sin (posse non peccare), he was not in a position where it was impossible for him to ■ sin (non posse peccare). Second, although man was not crem ated incapable of death, death is not natural to man. to the Bible, however, such an argument becomes irrelevant and absurd— and so Blake would have thought it. 16Cf. Genesis 3:15 of which I have suggested an inter pretation in footnote 1 of Chapter II. Third, man did fall, and he fell through sin. Fourth, sin led to disease and death so that man is now diseased or dead. On all these points Blake, in Jerusalem, is in essen tial agreement with the traditional interpretations of the Bible. If we grant considerable leeway in the definitions of "sin," "fall" and "death," very few of Blake's critics would contest these points. My conflict with the critics begins over the nature of the fall and man's nature after the fall. Too many readers of Blake seem unwilling to make a clear distinction between "divine" and "divinity." Blake seems to assert clearly that although man is divine, he is not divinity. There can be no doubt that Blake sees man as God-like. Los proclaims this to Albion when he says, "'Thou wast the Image of God . . .'" (Jerusalem 42:23). Blake's use of such titles as "Humanity Divine" and "Human Imagination Divine," which pervade Jerusalem, support the contention. But Blake is also absolutely certain that man is not God. And when man set himself up as God, he fell. Albion says, "0 my Children / I have educated you in the crucifying cruelties of Demonstration / Till you have as sumed the Providence of God & slain your Father" (Jerusalem 24:54-56). This notion does not lead to the inference, which has been drawn too often, that for Blake there is no God in the conventional sense. It is true, his God was not a conventional God. But as we shall soon see, he was God. 211 The biblical account, scanty and ambiguous as it is, agrees with Blake. Man was not satisfied to be the Image of God; he wished to be God, and so fell. Here is the account: Now the serpent was more subtil than any other beast of the field which God had made. And he said unto the woman, "Yea, hath God said, 'Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?'" And the woman said unto the ser pent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the gar den: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, 'Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.'" And the ser pent said unto the woman, "Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. (Genesis 3:1-7) Perhaps too much has been made of Eve's disobedience as a cause of the fall. Surely her sin was in part dis obedience. God had commanded Adam. "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." (Genesis 2:16-17) By eating the fruit, Adam and Eve disobeyed God's explicit prohibition. But to emphasize this aspect of the fall makes of God the severe, negative, arbitrary tyrant which Blake hated so much. It is possible, and even preferable, to see this prohibition as a creative limitation. It 212 established clearly man's dependency upon God and defined the limits of man's possibility. It was an assertion- that man was created the image of God, but that he was not God. However, man was not content to live within limitation, and < r \ assuming falsely that God was without limits, sought to be j as God. The serpent's original question invites Eve to j pass judgment on the Word of God for man, and thus assume I I the prerogative of God. The fact that Eve answers the j question, even in defense of God, demonstrates that she was j j willing to accept the invitation. The only proper answer j would have been "Satan, begone" (Matthew 4:10), which was, J Christ's answer when he was tempted in the wilderness. The | t first real hint of Eve's error comes when she mitigates ! i God's stern warning of the consequences of disobedience. j 1 God had said, "thou shalt surely die"; Eve says, "lest ye J die." Her attempt to vindicate God, who cannot be vindi- : cated, turns out to be a denial of God and a vindication of herself. The serpent's second statement demonstrates that Eve has fallen for the bait. He feels free to openly im- pune God and to appeal to Eve's desire to transcend her I limitations and be as God. God's command had made man clearly aware of his limitation. The serpent's promise ofr fered man the possibility of limitlessness. Paradoxically, however, in limitation lay freedom and life; in limitless ness lay bondage and death. Man in the image of God (imago \ dei) was a perfect creation who enjoyed the ability to 213 create. Man as God (sicut deus) was a jruined creation who was bound to decay and destroy. The cunning of the ser pent's temptation is seen in the fact that he did not tell an outright lie; he merely stretched the truth. The proof of man's "divineness" is seen in the fact that he did not need to tell an outright lie. In some ways it is a short step between imago dei and sicut deus. But the chasm that lies between is infinite, and drops down to death. The very fact that God found it necessary to remind man of his limitation is an evidence of man's possibility. Had man not contained this possibility, the serpent could not have tempted him. If man had not been lustful to turn possibil ity into eventuality, he would not have fallen. Man fell because he was not satisfied to be divine (imago dei) but wished to be divinity (sicut deus). This was man's sin, and it caused his fall. The same is true of Albion in Jerusalem. Albion, be^ fore the fall, was imago die, "the Image of God," the "Di vine Humanity." He was not a limitless being. By nature, he was limited, in fact, his very existence depended on certain bounds and limitations. When he aspired to tran scend those bounds, to remove the limitations, he fell. have depended heavily, throughout this discussion of the fall, on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall; A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1-3 (London, 1959), pp. 64-95. 214 The si cut deus man in Jerusalem is called the ’ ’Spectre" or the "Selfhood." The Spectre "is the Great Selfhood, / Satan, Worshiped as God by the mighty Ones of the Earth" (Jerusalem 33:17-18). It is important to recognize that the Spectre is not something "other" than Albion. Although separated from him, it is a part of him. So that, when Albion worships the spectre, he is really worshiping him self or setting himself up as God. The spectre is sepa rated from Albion in the sense that he has come to regard it as something which has an existence in and of itself, independent of him. He begins to see it as an object— an object worthy of worship. When Albion seeks to transcend the limitations of his divine nature and take on divinity, by deifying his spectre, his spectre begins to expect wor ship and proclaims, "I am God" (54:16). Albion discovers that the God of his limitation was a God of liberty, for giveness and mercy, and the God of his limitlessness is a God of bondage, law, and cruelty. So Albion, seeking free dom, has found bondage— a bondage to disease and death 1 R under the law. ° l®Urizen makes a speech in The Book of Urizen which is almost exactly parallel to what we have just said about Albion in Jerusalem. He is trying to justify his motives for the rebellion against the Eternals which caused the fall. He says, "I have sought for a joy without pain, "For a solid without fluctuation. 215 The notion of eternal death runs all the way through Jerusalem. It appears in the second line, where Blake an nounces the theme of his poem: Of the Sleep of Ulrol and of the passage through Eternal DeathI and of the awaking to Eternal Life. (4:1-2) Eternal death is not death forever? it is death to eternity | i or spiritual death. The cry "Albion is dead!" (12:6) rings j throughout the poem. Death pervades the poem. Jerusalem is full of such things as "the Souls of the Dead" (23:23), "the Spectres of the Dead" (47:12), "the Kingdom . . . [of] the Dead" (18:10), and "The Princes of the Dead" (55:12). Nor is death a mere metaphor; it is expressive of the lit eral condition of fallen man. The image of God has died and can be brought to life only through the resurrection. It is not only that man perceives himself as dead. Man is dead. He is a fallen creature. Jerusalem is full of evi dence on this point. In the sixty-first plate, Mary says to Joseph, who has accused her of infidelity, "'Art thou "Why will you die, O Eternals? "Why live in unquenchable burnings?" (Urizen 4:10r-.13) Urizen's motives seem to have been almost Promethean. He wished a better life for Man— a life without pain and with out fluctuation. What he seems to be dissatisfied with is the continual conflict between the Contraries. The Con^ traries did impose a kind of limitation on the Eternals, but they were also the source of their life and creativity. By removing them— by establishing "joy" over "pain" and "solid" over "fluctuation"— he removed the limitation but also the source of life. r ■ _ _ _ more pure / Than thy Maker who forgiyeth Sins & calls again | i Her that is Lost*” (lines 6-7, italics mine). Later in the! plate Joseph hears the voice of the Angel of Jehovah pro- I claiming "'behold, / There is none that liveth & sinneth not!'" (lines 23-24). In plate 45, Bath proclaims, "... The Man [Albion] is himself become "A piteous example of oblivion, To teach the Sons "Of Eden that however great and glorious, however loving "And merciful the individuality, however high "Our palaces and cities and however fruitful are our fields, "In Selfhood, we are nothing, but fade away in the mornings breath. "Our mildness is nothing: none but the Lamb of God can heal "This dread disease, none but Jesus. 0 Lord, des cend and s ave!" (lines 8-16) But perhaps the most conclusive evidence of this sort comes j in the preface to Chapter Three. Blake says, Man is born a Spectre or Satan & is altogether an Evil, | & requires a New Selfhood continually, & must continu- j ally be changed into his direct Contrary. ; (plate 52, prose) j Unless we engage in some very ingenious redefinition, the most obvious meaning of this passage is that man is onto- i logically fallen, and that he must be changed— ontologi- j £ | cally recreated. In fact, the passage comes very close to j being a statement of total depravity. Bloom must certainly j j be wrong, in the passage we quoted above, when he says that | the Selfhood is to be identified merely with the forms of official Christianity. The Selfhood is the deification of 217 the Self— the will to be God, which Blake identifies with "Pride," "Selfishness," "Self-glorying," "Self-love," and "Self-righteousness." And Albion finally admits his sin when he has been redeemed: "’I know it is my Self'" (96:13). The only way to be relieved from the "Self" is by forgive ness which is to "rise from Self / By Self Annihilation" (49:45), by "Self Denial" (18:20), and by the "willing sac rifice of Self" (28:20). The use of disease as a metaphor for the fallen condi tion of man is largely new in Jerusalem. The clouds of disease and plague which appear in Blake's early prophecies are largely political in nature. The concept of the dis eased soul makes only a brief appearance in The Four Zoas Milton. The metaphor comes, I think from the Book of Job, where Job is covered from head to foot with boils. But there, the disease is primarily external, although there is a sense in which Job's bodily disease is an evi dence of his soul's malady. In Jerusalem, disease is pri marily spiritual, and is only secondarily reflected in the disease of body. The "seven diseases of the Soul [which] / Settled around Albion" (Jerusalem 19:26-27) are reminiscent of the conventional notion of the seven deadly sins. In plate 4, Jesus tells Albion, "1 Thy nurses and thy mothers, thy sisters and thy daughters / Weep at thy soul's dis ease'" (lines 11-12). In plate 40, 218 ! Los shudder'd at beholding Albion, for his i disease Arose upon him pale and ghastly, and he call'd around The Friends of Albion; trembling at the sight of Eternal Death The Four appear'd .... (lines 1-4) Then comes the lament, "Albion is sick!1 1 said every Valley, every mournful Hill And every River: "our brother Albion is sick to death. "He hath leagued himself with robbers: he hath studied the arts "Of unbelief. Envy hovers over him: his Friends are his abhorrence: "Those who devour his soul are taken into his bosom:" (40:11-16) In plate 32, the poet describes Albion as pale and "Leaning against the pillars, & his disease rose from his skirts" (line 1). The influence of Job is present in all these lines. But it is more important to notice that the disease is spiritual and is linked with spiritual death. In plate 9, Los, describing for his spectre the horrors of Albion's fall, says, "'I saw disease forming a Body of Death around the Lamb / Of God to destroy Jerusalem & to devour the body ; of Albion'" (lines 9-10). Albion's "soul's disease" is forming itself into a "Body of Death." The "Body of Death" j is the "Great Spectre," the tyrant God of Albion. It in tends not only to destroy Jerusalem and devour Albion, but to pervert or prevent the Lamb of God. Albion's redemption ■ 219 j can come only when the "Body of Death" has been destroyed i and Albion delivered from its tyranny. There is an echo in I these lines of Paul's anguished cry, "0 wretched man that I; ami who shall deliver me from the body of this death" (Romans 7:24). Only Jesus, the Lamb, can deliver Albion from the "Body of Death." On the cross the "Body of Death" was formed around the Lamb. In the grave, he broke its power. This is the meaning of Donne's exultant cry, "Death thou shalt die." It might at first seem that this view of the fall is in contradiction to the usual view of the fall. This is not so. To those who see the fall exclusively as a psycho logical disorientation which leads to a limitation of per ception, the fall as death must be only metaphor. However, it does not follow that if we view the fall as an actual spiritual death, we must then see the psychological disori-, entation and loss of perception as metaphor. It is not that the usual view is wrong, it has merely come to occupy an unwarranted place in Blake’s vision of the fall. The problem is one of primacy and emphasis. The fall of man is a drama on two planes— the spiritual and the psychological, i A fall in the first realm is attended by a fall in the sec- j ond. When man dies spiritually, his psychological balance is upset and his endowments suffer a limitation. In a sense, the two are almost the same thing. In the garden, j i when Eve refused to perceive her true nature, she died, and j 220 her death led to the inability to perceive anything truly. Paul explains the process clearly: For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by things that are made, even his external power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image like to corruptible man, and to birds, and to four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is Blessed forever. (Romans 1:18-25) Once we have untangled the intricate Pauline syntax, it be comes evident that the language of this passage is in many ways Blakeian. In fact, it could serve as a very neat par allel to the passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell quoted earlier, in which Blake describes the origin of priesthood. The whole passage turns on the phrase, "God also gave them up." It is the point of death. He gave them up because they valued their own wisdom (in Blake's terms, the wisdom of their Selfhood) more than the wisdom of God, and he gave them up to their own wisdom. Their own wisdom, which was foolishness, became the limit of their perception. In verse 28 of the same chapter Paul again makes the same point with even more directness. He says, 221 "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowl-: edge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind ..." And in verse 32 he concludes by asserting that such men "are wor thy of death." Los makes essentially the same point when he says, "'That he who will not defend the Truth may be compelled to defend / A Lie: that he may be snared and caught and snared and taken'" (Jerusalem 9:29-30). He who refuses to defend the truth loses the ability to perceive truth and is consequently compelled to defend what he does perceive, which is a lie. That lie becomes his snare. Be tween the first and last part of that statement lies the fall, which is eternal death or death to eternity. Although an epistemological death is clearly involved in the ontological fall, it is not reasonable to elevate it to a position of primary importance. For, if we assume that the fall is merely epistemological, then we must also hold that man's essential nature remains unfallen, and that: he is capable, in and of himself, of redeeming himself. It seems quite clear, however, from such passages as Jerusalem 45:8-16 (quoted above) that Blake would firmly reject such a notion. He quite explicitly states, in that passage, that man is unable to do anything to redeem himself and must depend on Jesus to "descend and save." Therefore, to give the fall and redemption of Albion in Jerusalem a purely epistemological interpretation is wholly inadequate, i i Furthermore, although there is a very close relation- j 222 ship between epistemology and ontology in Jerusalem, ulti mately, epistemology is always dependent on ontology. That is, man can only see what he is capable of seeing, and what he is capable of seeing is dependent on what he ijs. This does not mean that man will always see as much as he is capable of seeing. In fact, if he consistently refuses to see as much as he is capable of, it will result in the di- minishment in the ability to see, or a change in being— a fall. But the reverse is not true. Once he has fallen, he cannot redeem himself by a simple expansion of perception, for his being forbids it. At this point he is in need of an ontological redemption, and only after such a redemption will he experience an expansion of perception. He needs, as Altizer puts it, "the radical transformation of the nat ural man."19 In Jerusalem 34-36, where Blake describes for us the fall and limitation of Reuben, he repeats the statement, "they became what they beheld," at least three times. A similar change takes place in Jerusalem 65 at the crucifix ion of Luvah when the sacrificers begin to experience the pains of the sacrificed and Blake again comments, "Sudden they become like what they behold" (line 75). There can be no doubt that on these occasions epistemology determines 1®Altizer, The New Apocalypse, p. 145. 223 \ ontology. Both events, however, are descriptions of a fall.; But there is no place in Jerusalem where the same or equiv alent statement is made of anyone being redeemed. In fact, ; in the only place in the poem where a real redemption 00^ curs (that is, the redemption of Albion) the talk is all of "death" and "resurrection." Two further questions arise. First, why should the words, "death" and "resurrection," not be taken in their most obvious sense? It requires the least complicated ex planation and raises the least problems simply to accept the notion (although critics seem to be unable to accept it) that when Blake uses the words "death" and "resurrec tion" he has in mind an actual ontological change. Further, the contexts in which those words appear (that is, the lan guage and the syntax that surrounds them) is so thoroughly Biblical (as we have demonstrated over and over again) that we must ask: Is it unreasonable, when reading the poem, to remember all of the meanings and associations which cluster; around those words in the Bible where they clearly imply an ontological change? Surely it is not. Finally, before we move ,on to the discussion of Blake's Christology and Soteriology, we must point out that once again Blake's vision is in essential agreement with the vision of primitive Christianity. The notion of an actual death, requiring an actual resurrection is perhaps the cen tral doctrine of primitive Christianity* Without a doubt - 224 I i the same notion is to be found in the doctrines of almost ; all Christian groups, but none have allowed it to inform their whole world view the way primitive Christianity has. The very notion of Christian primitivism is based on the conception that the Church was once alive and pure, is now fallen and dead, and must be transformed and reborn. This ecclesiastical cycle with its human and cosmic parallels determined their view in almost every other area. It de termined their attitude to the establishment churches. Since they were dead, no amount of reformation could save them, what they desperately needed was a radical transfor mation or new life. It determined their conception of the two Kingdoms. The Kingdom of God was the Kingdom of the Living; the Kingdom of this World was the Kingdom of the Dead. Consequently, the only way to enter the Kingdom of God was to be born (or reborn) into it by a resurrection ! from the dead. That this death and resurrection was for ! them an ontological transformation cannot be doubted, for they repeatedly spoke of the change (as does the New Testa-j ment) as the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new. It led to the notion in many groups, of the need for adult baptism— an outward sign of their spiritual death and resurrection which was possible because of the death and resurrection of Christ— rather than pedo-baptism | and confirmation— which suggested that the child had never | I been cut off from the Kingdom of God. And it led to their j 225 emphasis on redemption rather than revolution. Their whole social consciousness was, in fact, informed by their belief in the necessity of new life— which was for them not meta phor but fact. Jesus and Redemption i Blake's all absorbing preoccupation was with the per- t son of Jesus. In one form or another, Jesus appears as an ! important or even central figure in all of his works. In Jerusalem, this fascination reaches its highest point. At the top of plate 4 (the first plate of poetry), even above j j the title, Jerusalem, stands the Greek motto "Moyos 6 Ieous”— "Jesus, only." Indeed, Jesus appears in almost every plate of Jerusalem. But at the same time he does not seem to be in the poem as much as hovering over it. "Je sus," "the Christ," "the Lamb of God," "the Divine Body," "the Divine Vision," "the Human Imagination Divine" are only a few of the great variety of titles that Blake as signs to him. It is as though Blake were asserting that no easy definition of Jesus can be formulated. Certainly his work is emphatic in its declaration that Jesus can only be known in experience. But in whatever form he appears, he is the one criterion for judgment, and the one hope for salvation, for every character in the poem. Both parties are revealed by their attitudes toward Jesus^--the fallen Albion and his forces, by their apposition, Los and his 226 | I I forces, by their enthusiastic support and eager anticipa- j tion of his imminent appearance. However, it seems to be ; only at moments of crisis, all of which prefigure and an- i ticipate the ultimate crisis when Albion is redeemed, that Jesus actually enters the drama of the poem in person. Compared to Albion or Los or Jerusalem or even Vala, he speaks seldom. Yet he is there, always uppermost in every one's mind. Blake has succeeded where his master, Milton, stumbled. There can be no doubt that Jesus is the hero of the poem and Satan the villain. However, the attitudes of Blake's critics toward ! Blake's vision of Jesus cover a wide range. J. G. Davies j i and Margaret Bottrall espouse a view of Blake's Jesus which; conforms almost exactly to the orthodox, official Christian | view. Mark Schorer and Harold Bloom assert the opposite. For them, Blake's Jesus has almost nothing to do with or- I I thodox theology. Thomas Altizer, who draws heavily on j Hegelian Christianity, comes somewhere between. j Davies introduces his chapter, "His Doctrine of Christj i and of Redemption," with this caution: But like so many other individualists, who lacked the j sane equilibrium of the Catholic tradition, he conceived ] Christ in his own likeness, seizing on those features of his complex and vivid personality which most appealed to his genius, and neglecting those to which by nature he j was incapable of responding.20 ' ! ^Davies, The Theology of William Blake, p. 110. j 227 i i But he immediately goes on to assert, \ . . . [Blake’s] portrait of Jesus is at once both fresh and stimulating, while his Christology, which remains only in bold outlines, is in the main a rephrasing of orthodox doctrine in terms of his own idiom. . . . Nevertheless, the substance of his belief is identical with that of the Church.21 Bottrall is more concerned with coming to an under standing of the nature and work of Jesus in Blake's works than with proving his orthodoxy, but she makes it abun dantly clear, in passage after passage, that Blake's Jesus is essentially the same as the Jesus of orthodox Christian ity. And she comes finally to admit, However■unorthodox his approach, Blake reached a profound! understanding of the mystery, which for Catholics is per- I fectly embodied in the Mass, of a perpetual self offering of Christ, of his perpetual descent into sensible form, of his perpetual rebirth, passion, death and resurrec tion. 22 Bloom's notions on Blake's Christianity we have al ready given. But a further indication of his feelings is given in his comment on Jerusalem 96, which presents a con- j versation between Jesus and Albion about redemption, and ; which contains these lines: | Jesus replied: "Fear not Albion: unless I die i thou canst not live; "But if I die I shall rise again & thou with me. ."This is Friendship & Brotherhood: without it j Man Is Not." i Clines 14-16) ^Davies, p. 110. ^Margaret Bottrall, The Divine Image (New York, 1950), p. 52. 228 | I Bloom first singles out these lines for special attention | and then says, "the entire passage is perhaps Blake's most humanistic statement of his imaginative faith" [italics j mine].23 Very few of Blake's critics will go as far as Bloom to make their point. Schorer is much more careful and much more explicit in his assertion of essentially the same view. He comes back to Blake's vision of Jesus again and again, always with the same point of view. Schorer re- ! jects the notion that Blake's Christ is orthodox or even Christian, and his rejection demonstrates clearly that the doctrines of fall, Christ and redemption are so interdepen- ; dent that it is impossible to separate them. The concep- i j tion of one of them determines the conception of the others.! The following passages taken from Schorer contain more than | the present discussion requires. But they are such clear i statements of a point of view which is so prevalent among Blake's critics, that it will be useful to quote at length J r He says: The seventeenth century in England is the great the- j ater of the transformation, and when in the eighteenth 5 William Law said that "there is nothing that is super- ! natural, however mysterious, in the whole system of our j redemption; every part of it has its ground in the work- j ings and powers of nature and all our redemption is only nature set right, or made to be that which it ought to j be," he adequately exemplified that force which inverted j the metaphysical structure of mysticism and turned mys- ! ticism into something else, something moral and political,' ! | ^Bloom, "Commentary," p. 862. j 229 | f The thoroughness of the iirananental here drives out the j transcendental altogether. Redemption is placed entirely j in nature, and redemption is a problem of reorganization. ' It lays the groundwork for the even more characteristic j development of later Protestantism, the shift of interest I from the idea of God made man to that of man's Godliness: ' incarnation versus deification. . . . In Blake deification is a ubiquitous attitude. "All deities reside in the human breast" is a bluntly beauti ful way of stating it; a more cryptic statement is this: "The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is In- ! finite & he himself Infinite . . . God became as we are, that we may be as he is." Blake's Christ is not the Word become Flesh, but the Flesh become Word. He is not the gentle divinity of orthodoxy, but the rebel angel, identified in his most active moods with the figure of Revolution itself, which Blake called Ore. . . . His Jesus is the symbol not of God's grace but of man's eter- . nal gift for renewal. "The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: but those who envy or calumnate great men hate God; for there is no other God . . . if Jesus is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree."24 i Later, Schorer comes back to the same point, but with more ! emphasis: Once more Blake thrusts ahead into the realm of modern liberal theology. It is the insistence of liberalism i on the humanity of Jesus and the divinity of man that > enables it, however mistakenly from the point of view of j a more adequate theology, to substitute for the tradi tional paradox of the incarnation the easier idea of 251 grace as the individual's awareness of his own sanctity. The thrust of Schorer's point of view is not easy to miss, j Altizer's interpretation of Blake's Jesus is so very j I different from either of the views already presented, that j to understand it properly we would need to take more space 24schorer, The Politics of Vision, pp. 63^-64. ^^Schorer, p. 138. than we can give it, and it would lead us from our main i i I purpose. But there is a passage which suggests something of his meaning and will take us on our way: , t Is Jesus whom Blake named as the "Universal Humanity" and the "Human Imagination" simply a symbol of humanity itself? Has Blake merely given a poetic and symbolic expression to an Enlightenment humanism in his vision of : Jesus? Does the Jesus who dwells "in" us represent an essential core of human nature which transcends the frailties of weakness and vice? These questions can be answered in the affirmative only by denying the great body of Blake’s vision: they altogether ignore the > violence of Blake’s opposition to the "Deism" of his day, just as they set aside his continual pleas for a radical j transformation of the natural man, and ignore his total repudiation of all forms of moralism: "If Morality was Christianity, Socrates was the Savior." It is not Soc rates or the Buddha or the artist or the common man who is the Savior, but only Jesus; and only Jesus ie God. Humanity is deified m Jesusnot Jesus in humanity. ; The real problem posed by Blade's vision of Jesus is the identity of the Savior; for he—is^not simply the partic- ; ular man, Jesus of Nazareth; nor is he the Jesus who is j present in the cultus and images of the Church; nor, for i that matter, can Jesus be equated with the Lamb of Inno- ! cence. No, the Jesus who is God can only be the Jesus i of Experience, the Jesus who is actually and fully in^ j carnate in every hand and face. This is the Jesus who is most foreign to either the believer or the natural man; for this is the Jesus who resists every title, j every name, and every notion by which the mind of man might weaken and ensnare him.26 j 3 If we follow Altizer, we must give up both Bloom and Davies.j j Scanty as the passage may be in its presentation of what j his view is, it is explicit as to what the view is not^-xt j i t is not the humanism of Bloom and Schorer, nor is it the orthodoxy of Davies and Bottrall. In fact, it refutes the ! ] 1 views presented above so specifically that it would seem 1 26Altizer, p. 145 [italics Altizer's]. 231 | j to have been written expressly for that reason. j If we allow our mind to wander over the interprets" I tions of Blake's Jesus presented by Davies, Schorer and Altizer, it becomes apparent that, in effect, each refutes the other. Are they all wrong? Where are we to give con sent? To say that most of Blake's critics agree with Bloom; and Schorer does not really solve the problem. Both Davies and Altizer present enough careful evidence to give their arguments considerable credibility. It helps somewhat to realize that Davies and Altizer are on a firmer foundation than Schorer and Bloom, in that their views at least arise from an attempt to understand Blake's vision in the light of the New Testament evidence. Schorer, and Bloom in par ticular, commit a fatal error by largely ignoring what the ; New Testament has to say on the matter. Finally, Blake did! not spin this vision out of himself. However much he may | have differed with traditional Church doctrine, his vision j i i was grounded squarely on his understanding of the Bible, which was, it must be noted, also the source for official Church dogma. However, this consolation soon vanishes j when we realize that the New Testament is itself ambiguous j in its assertions of the nature of Christ. And Schorer's | I views, or ones much like them, could just as easily be de rived from the Bible itself. j l i There are in the Bible, and particularly in the New Testament, two quite radically divergent views on the 232 nature of Christ. His two most available names, Jesus and Christ, themselves suggest the ambiguity. There is in the j New Testament what may be called the Jesus tradition and j l ’ the Christ tradition. The first is Hebraic in origin and orientation. The second is Hellenic. The first finds its basis in the concept of the Old Testament Messiah, the promised Redeemer, the suffering Servant of Israel. The j second finds its basis in the Platonic and Aristotelian no tion of the Logos, and is most clearly expressed in the Prologue to John's Gospel, "In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word became flesh." Out of the first comes i the emphasis on Jesus the One Man, the Liberator and Savior i ! of the One Man, Adam. Out of the second comes the emphasis ! ! on Christ, transcendent God incarnate. The New Testament : i itself does not seem to clearly reconcile the two views, i although they are present throughout. Since Western Chris- | j tian theology finds its beginnings in Origen and Greek fathers, and has been dominated by the Platonism and Neo- I Platonism of St. Augustine and his followers, it has tended | i to emphasize the second tradition. This probably accounts j for the fact that Schorer and others, who are largely in nocent of the theological traditions, would fasten on the j i first tradition and think it un-Christian. I ! If we keep these distinctions in mind, it is easy to ! J < see why there has been such a wide range of interpretations j of Blake's vision of Jesus Christ. For Blake reflects the | 233 ambiguities of the Bible. His works, and particularly Jerusalem, contain both traditions. We have given a good deal of attention to the first tradition. It remains for us to point out a few passages in Jerusalem which reflect it. Perhaps the most striking example of how Blake uses this tradition can be seen in this hymn of Los. . . . "AlbionI Our wars are wars of life, & wounds of love "With intellectual spears, & long winged arrows of thought. "Mutual in one another's love and wrath all renewing "We live as One Man; for contracting our infinite senses "We behold multitude, or expanding, we behold as one, "As One Man all the universal Family, and that One Man "We call Jesus the Christ; and he in us, and we in him "Live in perfect harmony in Eden, the land of life, "Giving, receiving, and forgiving each other's trespasses. "He is the Shepherd of Albion, he is all in all, "In Eden, in the garden of God, and in heavenly Jerusalem. "If we offend, forgive us; take not vengeance against us." (38:14-26) It is easy, in the light of this passage, to see how Schorer could say, "Blake's Christ is not the Word become Flesh, but the Flesh become Word." This surely is his "de ification" rather than "incarnation." It is also easy, in the light of the emphasis of Western theology, to see how Schorer might judge such a view heretical. But essentially 234 the same notion is expressed repeatedly by Paul: j Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and j death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that | all have sinned: (For until the law sin was in the I world: but sin is not imputed where there is no law. j Nevertheless death reigned from Adams to Moses, even over ! them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's j transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come. ! But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For j if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many. And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the free gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift , is of. many offences unto justification. For if by one i man's offence death reigned by one, much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteous ness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.) There fore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one free j gift came unto all men unto justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. (Romans 5:12-19) j The same recapitulation of the human race in Adam and in j Christ is proclaimed in 1 Corinthians 15:22: "For as in { i Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." j ! Doubtlessly Blake would have found the legal language of j this passage repugnant, but he was in essential agreement j i with its central point. That point is the unity of the ! . whole race in One Man seen in two forms, Adam and Christ, and in two actions, fall and redemption. As one Bible com mentary puts it, . . . the cause of this universality of sin, and of its j consequence, death, is the unity of mankind in Adam; j and that, corresponding to this, there is a higher unity in Christ, who thus, as the true head and representative of the human race, becomes by his obedience unto death, a source of life and righteousness for all. It is thus evident that the comparison between Adam and Christ is no rhetorical illustration, but an earnest, argumentative statement of two great truths in their es- sential connexion, universal sinfulness and universal redemption. The master-thought of the whole passage is the unity of the many in the one, which forms the point of com parison between Adam and Christ.27 [italics author's] But there is another concept, suggested by both the "passage from Jerusalem and from Romans, which is perhaps even more important to the understanding of what we have called the Jesus tradition. We have already noticed that this side of New Testament Christology is founded upon Old Testament Messianism. The central emphasis in Messianism falls on the expectation of a promised Messianic Deliverer. Inasmuch as Jesus was conscious of fulfilling the role of the expected Messiah, it is as Deliverer of mankind that he 2 8 most consistently thought of himself. Inasmuch as first- century Israel accepted him as the promised Messiah, they thought of him as the Deliverer of Israel.2^ Unfortunately, the Jews had come to think of the Messiah almost exclu sively as a political revolutionary who would deliver Israel from the yoke of foreign oppression and restore the Kingdom of Israel to its former prominence and glory. Although such a notion is a further reflection of the direction of 2?F. C. Cook, ed., The Bible Commentary, Vol. Ill (New York, 1896), p. 115. 28cf. Mark 1:15, Luke 4:16-22. 2^cf. for example the Triumphal Entry Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-10, Luke 19:29-38 and John 12:12-18. post-exilic Judaism, it is not without basis in the Old Testament. Alongside the tradition of the Messiah as De liverer is an equally strong tradition of the Messiah as King.Although the New Testament declares Jesus the ful fillment of both Deliverer and King, it is explicit in its assertions that Jesus rejected the prevalent Jewish inters pretations of them.31- Strange as it may seem, Jerusalem also reflects the notion of Jesus as Messianic King. It is seen repeatedly in such phrases as Los's acknowledgement' that " 'he [Jesus] is the Lord and master" 1 (Jerusalem 38:23). But both in the New Testament and in Jerusalem, it is the notion of the Messiah as Deliverer that predominates. Here also, official Christianity and primitive Christianity part company. Because of its political involvements and because of its insistence on the present realization of the Kingdom 30cf. Isaiah 9:2-7, 11:1-9, Micah 5:2 and 5, Jeremiah 23:5-6, Ezekiel 34:11-15 and 23-31, 37:24, Hosea 3:5 and Amos 9:11. 31Jacobus, A New Standard Bible Dictionary, p. 575. Jesus "excluded from the Messiah's character the main ele ments of the popular ideal, i.e., that of a conquering hero,: who would exalt Israel above the heathen, and through such exclusion He seemed to fail to realize the older Scriptural conception. The failure, however, was only apparent and temporary. For in the second coming in glory He was to achieve this work. Accordingly, His disciples recognized a twofoldness in His Messiahship: (1) They saw realized in His past life the ideal Servant of Jehovah, and the spiri tual Messiah, the Christ who teaches and suffers for the people, and (2) they looked forward to the Davidic and con quering Messiah in His second coming in His power and glory to conquer the nations and reign over them." 237 of God, the notion of the Messiah as King has always re ceived strong emphasis in official Christianity. Because of its emphasis on the spiritual nature of the Kingdom of God, primitive Christianity has given its primary devotion to the Messiah as Deliverer and has been content to consign the Kingly role of Christ to the time of his second coming j when he will subdue all the nations and rule the world in j I I perfect harmony and truth. Appropriately it is in Revela- j tion that the concept of the Messiah as King is given pri mary emphasis and in the Gospels that the Messiah is seen primarily as the Deliverer. It is this notion of the Mes siah as Deliverer that we must now try to understand. The primary source for the tradition of the Messiah as on Deliverer is Deutero-Isaiah. But the Messiah presented by Deutero-Isaiah is no political revolutionary; lie is the Servant of Jehovah. He does not come to deliver Israel from political oppression, but mankind from the tyranny of their sin. That is, just as the covenant was not intended to be the exclusive property of Israel, so the Messiah was not promised to the Jews alone. His salvation will be for all people— Jew and Gentile alike. And he [Jehovah] said, "It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest ^Jacobus, p. 557. Cf. also Isaiah 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-9, 52:13-53:12. j ......... ' " " " * ' 238 : I j I ! be my salvation unto the end of the earth. . . . That thou mayest say to the prisoners, 'Go forth?' to them that are in darkness, 'Shew yourselves.' They shall feed in the ways, and their pastures shall be in all the high places. They shall not hunger nor thirst? neither shall the heat nor the sun smite them: for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of water shall he guide them." (Isaiah 49:6, 9-10) The imagery of this passage is poetic and ambiguous. There is no clear indication whether the "prisons" and "darkness" from which the Messiah will deliver mankind are to be in terpreted spiritually or politically. The last part of the passage, however, presents the relationship between the Messiah and mankind as the relationship between shepherd and sheep. We are reminded by this image of Christ's claim, "I am the Good Shepherd" (John 10:11), which is echoed by Los when he proclaims of Jesus, "He is the Good Shepherd, . . . / He is the Shepherd of Albion, . . (Jerusalem 38:23-24). The ambiguity of the previous pas sage begins to disappear when we hear Deutero-Isaiah call the Messiah "a servant of rulers," and when he prophesies that although he will be despised and abhorred, princes and kings will ultimately come to worship him: Thus saith the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One, "To him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, to a servant of rulers, Kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship, because of the Lord that is faithful, and the Holy One of Israel, and he shall choose thee." (Isaiah 49:7) There is scant evidence in this passage for the Messiah as political revolutionary. It should in fact suggest a 239 glaring contrast between what we normally expect of a popu lar political hero and the miserable picture of a Messiah who is a rejected and despised servant. When we read Isaiah 53, all of these notions of the Messiah emerge sharply, along with some others we have not yet presented. This chapter is perhaps one of the most familiar passages in the Bible: Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sor rows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgres sions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastise ment of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep be fore her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. (Isaiah 53:1-10) The picture of the Messiah presented in this passage agrees remarkably with the main features of the life of Christ as presented in the Gospels. What it adds to the picture of 240 the Messiah already presented is the notion of vicarious suffering. The Servant of Jehovah will deliver mankind from their suffering and sin by bearing their suffering and giving "his soul an offering for [their] sin." Almost all the features of this picture of Jesus, who is the fulfillment of the Messianic promise, are found in Jerusalem. We read that Jesus "Gathered Jerusalem's Chil dren in his arms & bore them like / A Shepherd in the night of Albion which overspread all the Earth" (60:8-9). In the same plate the "Slaves" grinding at the mills of Albion sing "the Song of the Lamb" (line 38). "I gave thee liberty and life, O lovely Jerusalem, "And thou hast bound me down upon the Stems of Vegetation. "I gave thee Sheep-walks upon the Spanish Moun tains, Jerusalem, 1 1 1 gave thee Priam's City and the Isles of Grecia lovely. "I gave thee Hand & Scofield & the Counties of Albion, "They spread forth like a lovely root into the Garden of God, "They were as Adam before me, united into One Man, "They stood in innocence & their skiey tent reach'd over Asia "To Nimrod's Tower, to Ham & Canaan, walking with Mizraim "Upon the Egyptian Nile, with solemn songs to Grecia "And sweet Hesperia, even to Great Chaldea & Tesshina, "Following thee as a Shepherd by the Four Rivers of Eden. . "Why wilt thou rend thyself apart, Jerusalem "And build this Babylon & sacrifice in secret Groves "Among the Gods of Asia, among the fountains of pitch & nitre? (Jerusalem 60:10-24) Jerusalem answers, "0 Lord & Savior, have the Gods of the Heathen pierced thee, "Or hast thou been pierced in the House of thy Friends? "The Stars of Albion cruel arise; thou bindest to sweet influences, "For thou also sufferest with me, altho' I j behold thee not; j "And altho* I sin & blaspheme thy holy name, ' thou pitiest me ! "Because thou knowest I am deluded by the , turning mills "And by these visions of pity & love because j of Albion's death." I (60:52-53 and 60-64) , i There is a surprising similarity between the images j used to present Jesus in these passages and the images which are used to describe the Messiah in Deutero-Isaiah. I Jesus is presented as the Shepherd of man, who has been re- j I jected by his flock, but who nevertheless bears their suf fering so that they may be delivered from their sinful darkness. It should also be evident from these passages that it is possible for the Messiah to bear the suffering and sin of the whole race primarily because all men are united in him. Jesus says, in "the Song of the Lamb," sung by the 'Slaves,' "'They were as Adam before me, united into One Man'" (line 16). On the other hand, if the Savior is capable of suffer ing for the race because all men are united in him, then suffering inflicted upon one member of the race is suffer ing inflicted on the Savior, and the murder of one member 242 of the race is a murder of the Savior: "As the Sons of Albion have done to Luvah, so they have in him "Done to the Divine Lord & Saviour, who suffers with those that suffer; "For not one sparrow can suffer & the whole Universe not suffer also "In all its Regions, & its Father & Saviour not pity and weep. "But Vengeance is the destroyer of Grace & Repentance in the bosom "Of the injurer, in which the Divine Lamb is cruelly slain." (Jerusalem 25:6-11) Jesus makes exactly the same point in the New Testament, in his parable of the Last Judgment: When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from his goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared fro you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me." Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, "Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? „ Or when saw we thee sick or in prison, and came unto thee?" And the King shall answer and say unto them, "Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matthew 25:31-40) Jesus then turns to the goats on his left hand side and says, "Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal," (Matthew 25:45-46) The primary import of this parable is its assertion of the unity of the one and the many. Just as a pain inflicted on our fellow man is a pain inflicted on Jesus, so a kind ness shown to our fellow man is a kindness shown to Jesus. i But it is worth noting, incidentally, that this parable ] stands as a kind of major backdrop to the whole of Jerusa- j lem. At the top of plate 3, which is the preface to Chap- I ter One, Blake has inscribed the words "SHEEP” and "GOATS" on the left and right sides of the plate. We need not worry j ourselves about the fact that Blake reversed the Biblical arrangement. "Left" and "right" are after all relative di rections. The sheep and the goats would appear on different hands depending upon whether they were observed from the } point of view of the judge or the judged. Blake is obvi ously, as he makes clear in several places in Jerusalem, assuming the position of the judged. But more important, it is another one of those highly condensed mottos which give us a glimpse into the heart of the drama of the poem. All of the characters of Jerusalem are facing the Last Judgment, and they are being separated into sheep or goats according to their relationship with Jesus. But at the same time, Jerusalem is the account of how men may pass from one group to the other. There is one more idea which is hinted at in this par able which must be noticed before we go on to the second :Christological tradition. Christ here is called, or calls 244 himself, the Son of Man. To discover what this title means in the New Testament will help us to understand the Messi anic tradition. There are two parallel titles for Christ in the New Testament— Son of Man and Son of God. We must ‘ I caution immediately against making an easy identification j j of the first with Christ's human nature, and the second j with his divine. The Bible does not support such an iden tification, and to make it puts unwarranted stress on the j separate natures of Christ. Both titles apply to the whole j person— Christ Jesus, God-Man. We should be reminded that it is precisely the unity of the two natures in Christ which provides the possibility of his redemptive act. Son of Man is the title which Jesus uses for himself most often, par-, ticularly in the Synoptic Gospels. And although it is not to be mistaken as a title of Jesus as Man, its use does em phasize the idea of humanity. It is humanity, however, in the ethical, not metaphysical sense— humanity not as con trasted with divinity, but as opposed to inhumanity or bru tality. It emphasizes humanity in the sense that man is most human when he is imago dei and less than human when he aspires to be sicut deus. The Kingdom which comes with the triumph of Jesus is at the same time the Kingdom in which humanity triumphs and attains its proper condition. It is the Kingdom, to enter which man must deny his Self, or as Blake would put it, annihilate his Selfhood, and be reborn as the Image of God. It is the Kingdom which can come only 245 after the reign of inhumanity, and the tyranny and pride of the Spectre have been broken. Hence everything in the per son and work of Jesus which is congruous with this--all that is human, sympathetic, redemptive, emancipating— is ascribed to him with the title, the Son of Man. Finally, the title is also associated with Christ's function as the suffering servant of man. Or rather, it is as the suffer ing servant, that Jesus accomplishes his task of restoring man to his true divine nature: And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: Even as the Son of Man came not to be minis tered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ran som for many. (Matthew 20:27-28) The second Christological tradition, the tradition which emphasizes Christ as incarnate God, is much more fa miliar to the western mind, and has been expounded with some care at the beginning of this chapter. The primary sources for this tradition are the Gospel of John and the writings of Paul. The main features of this view of Christ seem to be: Christ is preexistent and transcendent God who gave up His position in Heaven to be incarnated in the form of sinful man. In his death on the cross, God died for man, and in his resurrection from the grave, God rose for man eternally. There are dozens of passages in the New Testament to support these contentions. Jesus attests to his own preexistence when he says, "'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am'" (John 8:58) , and 246 in his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, "'And now, 0 Father, glorify thou me with thine own glory which I had with thee before the world was'" (John 17:5). But perhaps the most explicit presentation of all of these notions is given by Paul in the famous kenosis passage: Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: . . . (Philippians 2:5-9) There is a curious passage in Jerusalem which is similar to Paul's statement, but it is ambiguous. Los says, "Chaunti revoice! Of that Eternal Man "And of the cradled Infancy in his bowels of com passion "Who fell beneath his instruments of husbandry & became "Subservient to the clods of the furrow; the cattle and even "The emmet and earth-Worm are his superiors & his lords." (56:29-37) The passage is ambiguous because we cannot be sure whom it refers to. It might well refer to Jesus. There is a hint of the kenosis in "fell beneath his instruments of hus bandry," of the incarnation in "the cradled Infancy" and his subservience to "the cattle," of the Passion in "bowels of compassion," and of the grave in his subservience "to the clods of the furrow," the "emmet and earth-Worm." The chief objection to this identification is the fact that 247 Blake usually reserves the title "Eternal Man" for Albion. In fact it occurs very seldom in Jerusalem, although it is a favorite title for Albion in The Pour Zoas. The passage, however, has much to suggest that Blake is here thinking of < Jesus, and if so, it makes a very nice parallel to the pas sage from Philippians. Although Blake never used the word "incarnation" in any of his writings, there is strong evidence for his be lief in it throughout Jerusalem. In Plate 25, the inhabi tants of Beulah cry out from the depths of their need, j i "'Descend, 0 Lamb of God, & take away the imputation of Sin'" (line 12). Bath, after asserting the inability of man to save himself, proclaims, "'none but the Lamb of God can heal / This dread disease, none but Jesus. 0 Lord, de scend and save!'" (45:14-15). Later in the same speech, Bath, again asserting Albion’s inability to save himself, proclaims, "'Nothing but mercy can save him! nothing but mercy interposing / Lest he should slay Jerusalem in his fearful jealousy,'" and then crys out, "'0 God, descend! gather our brethren: deliver Jerusalem'" (lines 24-26). In Erin's great speech at the end of Chapter Two, Blake paraphrases Mary and Martha's anguished appeal to Jesus af ter the death of Lazarus their brother (John 11:21), "'Come Lord Jesus, Lamb of God descend! for if, 0 Lord! / If thou hadst been here, our brother Albion had not died'" (50:10- 11). After reading these passages, there can be little 248 doubt that Blake thought of Jesus as divine, and in some sense, transcendent and preexistent, and that the descent of God is in some way an incarnation. But the strongest suggestion of the incarnation^3 comes in Los's speech to Albion: "... the Savior in Mercy takes "Contraction's Limit, and of the Limit he forms Woman, That j "Himself may in process of time be born Man to redeem." j (42:33-35) The redemptive work of Christ, which was accomplished by the death of God with its demand for a participatory death on the part of fallen man, and in the resurrection of I God with its possibility for the participatory resurrection of man, is also present throughout Jerusalem. Albion cries out to Jesus, "Dost thou appear before me, who liest dead in Luvah's Sepulcher? But the most orthodox statement of Blake's Christol- ogy comes from Milton and not Jerusalem. In what might be called the "Prologue" to that poem he says, . . . Tell also of the False Tongue! vegetated Beneath your land of shadows, of its sacrifices and Its offerings: even till Jesus, the image of the Invisible God, Became its prey, a curse, and offering and an atonement For Death Eternal in the heavens of Albion & before the Gates 0 Jerusalem his Emanation, in the heavens beneath Beulah. (Milton 2:10-15) 249 "Dost thou forgive me, thou who wast Dead & art Alive? "Look not so merciful upon me, 0 thou Slain Lamb of GodI "I die! I die in thy arms tho* Hope is banished from me." (24:57-60) The Dead cry out, "0 when shall the morning of the grave appear, and when "Shall our salvation come? we sleep upon our watch, "We cannot awake, and our Spectres rage in the forests. "0 God of Albion, where art thou? pity the watchers J" (42:71-74) Los hears the voice of Jesus from out of his furnaces: "Albion goes to Eternal Death. In me all Eternity "Must pass thro' condemnation and awake beyond the Grave." (35:9-10) Jesus comforts despairing Jerusalem (again a paraphrase from the Mary and Martha story): ". . . fear not! lo, I am with thee always "Only believe in me, that I have power to raise from death "Thy Brother who Sleepeth in Albion; fear not trembling Shade." (60:67-69) Later, when Jerusalem faints over "the Cross & Sepulcher" (61:49), Jesus again reassures her, "'Repose on me till the morning of the Grave. I am thy life1" (62:1). In the same plate, Jerusalem, who has gained courage, lists the geneal ogy of Vala and then says, "These are the Daughters of Vala, Mother of the Body of Death; 250 "But I, thy Magdalen, behold thy Spiritual Risen Body. "Shall Albion arise? I know he shall arise at the Last DayI "I know that in ray flesh I shall see God; ..." (62:13-16) To which Jesus replies, and his reply is in part a direct quote from John 19:26, "'I am the Resurrection & the Life. / I Die & pass the limits of possibility as it appears / To individual perception'" (lines 18-20). Albion in one of his fits of despair, laments, "I die! I go to Eternal Death! the shades of death "Hover within me & beneath, and spreading them- selves outside "Like rocky clouds, build me a gloomy monument of woe. "Will none accompany me in my death, or be a Ransom for me "In the dark Valley? I have girded round my cloke, and on my feet "Bound these black shoes of death, & on my hands, death's iron gloves." (39:16-21) The answer comes to Albion at the very last, and it leads to his redemption: Jesus replied: "Fear not Albion: unless I die thou canst not live: "But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me." (96:14-15) "And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself "Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love "As God is Love; ..." (96:25-27) There can be little doubt that once more Jerusalem is in essential agreement with the Bible. In fact, all of these passages, which we have culled from the poem to demonstrate 251 Blake's belief in the second Christological tradition, are saturated with paraphrases and direct quotations from the New Testament. Not only is the basic conception of Christ essentially the same in Jerusalem as in the Bible, but the i very language in which that belief is couched is Biblical, j There are, then, two great Christological traditions, j There is the tradition of the Messianic Deliverer who re-' i stores man to his essential humanity, and there is the tra^- j i dition of the Christ— the God incarnate— who makes it pos- j t sible for man to be reborn a new creature. Both are present) I i in Jerusalem and in the Bible. And although the relation^ \ s ship between the two traditions is never very clearly j ! defined in the Bible, in Jerusalem Blake seems to be saying that they are both brought together in the act of Forgive- j ness. If there is one idea which predominates in Jerusalem, it is the idea of Forgiveness. By now the concept-of For giveness has become a familiar one. We have had occasion to consider it repeatedly throughout this study. Our task here will not be to try to understand what Blake means by Forgiveness, but to discover its role in Jerusalem. We should note first of all that it is an idea which is uniquely Christian. And to belabor the similarities be tween Jerusalem and the Bible on this point would be to cover ground already familiar to everyone. We should also note that it is an idea which in Blake's works takes a 252 prominent place for the first time in Jerusalem. The word Forgive, or forms of it, appears in The Four Zoas only three times, and in Milton only three times. In Jerusalem, it j appears 48 times. Although this contrast is significant-, I the contrast is even more striking than the statistics j would suggest. Forgiveness is the central and unifying | idea for a whole host of other ideas in the poem. Blake's I ! i conception of "Self-denial," "Self Annihilation," "Love," i r i "Brotherhood," "Friendship," "Regeneration," "Unity," "Per- ! ception" and many other ideas can only be understood in the j light of their relationship to his conception of Forgive- j ness. Forgiveness is a kind of * lock--piece1 which holds allj the other pieces of the intricate puzzle together. When we j i I add all these ideas together (and many of them, like For- j giveness, are new with Jerusalem), the contrast between the j point of view in Jerusalem and Blake's earlier works be- J comes overwhelming. It presents the final proof that Blake's vision in Jerusalem is not the same as his earlier visions, i no matter how ,many similarities there might be, and in spite of the fact that we may often find the germs of his Jerusalem vision in his earlier works. There are two great threads which run through Jerusa lem. The one may be called the psychological or cosmologi cal. The other may be called the spiritual. To use the terms introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the first is the epistemological, and the second the ontological. 253 Although they are not the same, they are parallel and united strands of the same thread. They are like two sides of a coin. I do not wish to deny the existence of either side. What ever we do to the coin, as long as it remains a ; j coin, it will always have two sides. My question is: j t j Which side is heads? and which side is tails? This can j most easily be determined by looking at the coin. In the ; I j criticism on Jerusalem, too many critics have chosen sides i without looking closely at the coin, or by looking at other j coins. Both strands are present in all three of the great j doctrines which we are here discussing. In terms of the fall: it is not that man experiences a limitation in per ception and, therefore, suffers an epistemological fall; it . is that man suffers an ontological fall and so experiences a limitation of perception. In terms of redemption: it is not that man experiences an expansion of perception and, therefore, enjoys an epistemological redemption; it is that man experiences an ontological redemption and so enjoys an expansion of perception. Heads must be heads, and tails must be tails. Logically, the difference between these two points of view may seem small, but soteriologically, the difference is crucial. With such a perspective of the fall and redemption, the two Christological traditions can now be seen to fit beautifully. As the incarnate God, Christ, by his death and resurrection, makes the ontological change possible. As the Messiah, Jesus, by bearing the burden of 254 man's oppression, delivers man from his own psychological self-tyranny. The two strands are finally woven into a single thread in the act of Forgiveness. As we have noticed in Chapter II, forgiveness is a willing self-sacrifice demanded by and dependent on the willing self-sacrifice of Christ. As we have noticed in Chapter I, forgiveness is the act of love which annihilates the tyranny of the Selfhood and brings it into balance. Perhaps Blake's most important contribution to Christian thought is the notion of self-forgiveness. In order to be redeemed, man must not only learn to be for-* given by God, and to forgive his fellow, he must also learn to forgive himself. Unless he can learn that, he cannot learn the rest. Albion Redeemed It remains for us to consider the scene which describes 'the redemption of Albion. We have had occasion to make reference to this scene repeatedly in this study. Its main features will by now be clear. But it will be worth our while to present it in its entirety and to discuss the re lationship of its parts. For it is, to my view, the cru cial scene in the poem. From the very beginning of Jerusa lem we anticipate it, and when it comes, it enlightens all that has gone before. The Jesus appeared standing by Albion as the Good Shepherd By the lost Sheep that he hath found, & Albion knew that it Was the Lord, the Universal Humanity; & Albion saw his Form A Man, & they conversed as Man with Mem in Ages of Eternity. And the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los. Albion said: "0 Lord, what can I do? my Self hood. cruel "Marches against thee, deceitful, from Sinai & from Edom "Into the Wilderness of Judah, to meet thee in his pride. "I behold the Visions of my deadly Sleep of Six Thousand Years "Dazzling around thy skirts like a Serpent of . precious stones & gold "I know it is my Self, 0 my Divine Creator & Redeemer." Jesus replied: "Fear not Albion: Unless I die thou canst not live; "But if I die I shall rise again & thou with me. "This is Friendship & Brotherhood: without it Man is Not." So Jesus spoke: the Covering Cherub coming on in darkness Overshadow'd them. S i Jesus said: "Thus do Men in Eternity "One for another to put off, by forgiveness, every sin." Albion reply'd: "Cannot Man exist without Mysterious "Offering of Self for Another? is this Friend ship & Brotherhood? "I see thee in the likeness & similitude of Los my Friend." Jesus said: "Wouldest thou love one who never died "For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? "And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself "Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love 256 "As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death "In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood." (Jerusalem 96:3-28) The situation has been presented. Albion for the first time in the poem has realized his real problem. He has fallen under the domination of the Selfhood. He confesses, "'I know it is my Self."1 And with that realization comes the willingness, also for the first time, to listen to Je sus. Jesus presents the answer. God has died for man that man may die for his Self. Death consists of an act of love, which is the basis of forgiveness, or in an act of kindness, which is its equivalent. Then, again for the first time, Albion begins to feel "terror" for someone else besides himself, which is love, and he performs an act of love by casting himself into "the Furnaces of affliction," which is a death. Immediately, the furnaces become "Fountains of Living Water," which is rebirth or new life. Then, mirac ulously, his four Zoas rise up in their pristine order and harmony. And all nature is once again seen in its pristine order and harmony. Albion stood in terror, not for himself but for his Friend Divine; & Self was lost in the contemplation of faith And wonder at the Divine Mercy & at Los's sublime honour. "Do I sleep amidst danger to Friends? 0 my Cities & Counties, 257 "Do you Sleep? rouze up, rouze up! Eternal Death is abroad!" So Albion spoke & threw himself into the Furnaces of affliction. All was a Vision, all a Dream: the Furnaces became Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity Divine. And all the Cities of Albion rose from their Slumbers, and All The Sons & Daughters of Albion on soft clouds, waking from Sleep. Soon all around remote the Heavens burnt with flaming fires, And Urizen St.Luvah & Tharmas & Urthona arose into Albion's Bosom. Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds 0 Heaven, Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity. "Awake, Awake, Jerusalem! 0 Lovely Emanation of Albion, "Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time; "For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day "Appears upon our Hills. Awake, Jerusalem, and come away!" (96:30-97:4) At the risk of being somewhat repetitious, I give in con clusion the stirring hymn, sung by the poet, Blake, in the lyric contained in the preface to Chapter Two: The Divine Vision still was seen, Still was the Human Form Divine, Weeping in weak & mortal clay, 0 Jesus, still the Form was thine. And thine the Human Face, & thine The Human Hands & Feet & Breath, Entering thro' the Gates of Birth And passing thro' the Gates of Death And O thou Lamb of God, whom X Slew in my dark self-righteious pride, Art thou return'd to Albion's Land? And is Jerusalem thy Bride? Come to my arms & never more Depart, but dwell for ever here Create my Spirit to thy Love: Subdue my Spectre to thy Fear. Spectre of Albion! warlike Fiend In clouds of blood & ruin roll'd I here reclaim thee as my own, My Selfhood! Satan! arm’s in gold. In my Exchanges every Land Shall walk, & mine in every Land Mutual shall build Jerusalem, Both heart in heart & hand in hand. (Jerusalem 27:57-76, 85-88) APPENDIXES 259 A P P E N D I X I 260 APPENDIX I The two critics who have devoted the most careful attention to the theme and structure of Jerusalem are Karl Kiralis ("The Theme and Structure of William Blake's Jerusalem," The Divine Vision, ed., V. de Sola Pinto [London, 1957], pp. 141-162) and Edward J. Rose ("The Struc ture of Blake's Jerusalem," Bucknell Review, IX [May, 1963], 35-54). Kiralis, the first to give special attention to structure, suggests that "actually William Blake explains . . . [the] theme and structure [of Jerusalem] within the work itself. The . . . structure . . . is described on plate 98 . . (p. 141). The passage Kiralis refers to is as follows: And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in visions In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect, Creating Space, Creating Time, according to the wonders Divine Of Human Imagination throughout all the Three Regions immense Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age; & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent, varying According to the subject of discourse; & every Word & every Character Was Human according to the Expansion or Con traction, the Translucence or 261 262 Opakeness of Nervous fibers: such was the variation of Time & Space Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary; & they walked To & fro in Eternity as One Man, reflecting each in each & clearly seen And seeing, according to fitness & order. (Jerusalem 98:28-40) Kiralis then claims that "... every phrase in this passage is intended to clarify some aspect of the work, especially the theme and structure" (p. 145). He then picks out what he calls the two "key phrases"— "the Three Regions immense / Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age," and "One Man, reflecting each in each"— and develops their relation to the theme and structure of Jerusalem at great length. Of the first phrase Kiralis explains, It has often been noted that, after the first chapter, which is addressed "To the Public," each chapter is directed at a specific group: Chapter II to the Jews, III to the Deists, and IV to the Christians. What have escaped notice are the progressive relationships of these three religions to "the Three Regions immense / 0 Child hood, Manhood & Old Age," for it can be demonstrated that Blake, in Jerusalem, considers the Jews to be in a state of mental childhood, the Deists in manhood, and the Christians either in maturity if the theoretical poten tial of Christianity is realized or in senility if it is not. (p. 147) For Kiralis . . . Chapter I is the general introduction, the prelude or overture, to the other three chapters. It contains the story of the fall and considers, in brief, the forces which would help and those which would hinder man as de scribed with variation and elaboration in the subsequent chapters. (p. 148) Of the second phrase he says. If the structure of growth is comprehended, the other key phrase, "One Man, reflecting each in each," should be readily understandable, for the very nature of growth 263 involves reflection. As the child is father of the man and each age reflects characteristics of the foregoing ones, so the chapters of Jerusalem reflect one another but at the same time remain a unit as the child, youth, and mature man are "One Man." (p. 158) There are, unfortunately, very serious objections to such a neat pattern. For example, it is Druidism and not Judaism which Blake identifies as the primal religion, and Blake de votes far more attention to Druidism in Chapter III and IV than he does in Chapter I and II. Mr. Rose has another ob jection to Kiralis's scheme. He says, "The four parts of Jerusalem cannot be said to correspond even loosely to an introduction followed by childhood, maturity and old age— the three regions of man" (p. 49). His objection to this struc ture seems to be grounded on the legitimate observation that there is not the clear and consistent progression or devel opment from chapter to chapter that Kiralis seems to suggest. Rose, however, falls into a similar trap and proposes a structure which is just as rigid and just as untenable. Immediately following his denial of the validity of Kiralis's structure cited above, Rose counters with his own scheme, and goes on to present more evidence against Kiralis. He says, Instead, the four parts are a series of states dominated by an appropriate Zoa, and marked by the attributes and imagery associated with that Zoa. Thus, each part is controlled structurally (as indicated by the imagery and thematic patterns) by a major aspect of fallen man repre sented in turn by Tharmas, Luvah, Urizen, and Los. Part Three could be said to have maturity as one of its themes only because it deals with the "ripe" error of organized religion— Deism. Part Two could be said to have child hood or youth as one of its themes because it is domi 264 nated by Luvah and the Ore cycle, dealing with the "Fe male will." However, it is Part One that deals with old age, the parent power, Tharmas. (p. 49) Four Zoas and Four Parts provide a neat and tempting paral lel. But it can not stand. For one thing, Los figures most prominently in the early chapters and gradually gives up his place to Jesus as the poem progresses. Secondly, Tharmas and Uruzen (in the form in which they appear in Blake's earlier works) play almost no part at all in Jerusalem. Tharmas, for instance, makes only one fleeting appearance in the chapter in which he is said to dominate. But even more puzzling is the fact that Rose uses the structure of The Gates of Paradise as a key to unlock the structure of Jerus alem. He says, "For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise sums up the major images of Jerusalem" (p. 44). He finds that The Gates of Paradise is structured around the Four Zoas. Whether or not his analysis of The Gates of Paradise is cor rect, he does not show, nor do I think it possible to show, that because The Gates of Paradise is structured about the Four Zoas, Jerusalem is therefore also structured about the Four Zoas. But Rose goes on to extend his structure in another direction. He says, In Jerusalem, Part One stresses the psychological, Part Two the sociological, Part Three the rational, and Part Four the visionary aspects of the dialectic. These are the conceptual modes of the four parts. (p. 52) The most obvious objection to such a schematization is that it is impossible to separate the categories as neatly as Rose has done.. This_objection becomes immediately valid when we consider particular scenes in Jerusalem. Why, for instance should we designate the debate between Los and his Spectre in Chapter One, which is certainly one of the major scenes in that chapter, as psychological rather than rational? Or even more to the point, in what way is it helpful to designate the building of Golgonooza, also in Chapter One, as psychological? Or in what way does the vision of Joseph and Mary, which comes to Jerusalem in Chap ter Three, support the contention that the major preoccupa tion in Chapter Three is with the rational? And the cruci fixion of Luvah in Chapter Three (especially in the light of the identification of Luvah with Prance) is certainly as specifically sociological as Blake is wont to get. But it is also psychological, and political, and religious, and a host of other things— which suggests other questions. Where in this scheme is there room for Blake's obvious preoccupa tion with the religious and political in Jerusalem? Finally the charge which Mr. Rose levels against Mr. Kiralis must be leveled against him. The themes he finds are most certainly there, but they cannot be made to dominate in specific sec tions of the poem the way he has made them dominate, nor can they be limited to specific sections of the poem the way he has limited them. Northrop Frye (Fearful Symmetry [Boston, 1947], pp. 356-360) also falls into the trap in his eagerness to find four neat themes for the four chapters of Jerusalem. Frye 266 considers the structure of Jerusalem to be parallel to the structure of the Bible. He says, The imaginative vision of human life sees it as a drama in four acts: a fall, the struggle of man in a fallen world which is what we usually think of as history, the worlds redemption by a divine man in which eternal life and death achieve a simultaneous triumph, and an apoca lypse. . . . Part One, addressed to the public, sets the fall over against Golgonooza, the individual palace or watchtower of art from which the visionary may see nature in its true form as a sleeping giant. . . . Part Two, addressed to the Jews, sets the vision of the world under the law over against the evolution of the Bible out of history. Part Three, addressed to the Deists, contrasts the coming of Jesus with the resistance to his teachings which Deism expresses. Part Four, addressed to the Christians, deals at once with the apocalypse and the final epiphany of Antichrist. (p. 357) Certainly, Frye is more accurate than Rose, for Jerusalem has much more in common with the patterns of the Bible than the Four Zoas. But again, Jerusalem is not so neatly ar ranged as Frye's four act drama. Although it is true that the closest thing to a crucifixion appears in chapter Three, the fall is dealt with in all four of the chapters, and Chapter Four can hardly be said to be dominated by the Apocalypse, since it appears suddenly only in the last few plates of the chapter. David V. Erdman (Blake: Prophet acrainst Empire [Princeton, 1954]) is certainly correct when he claims that although there is "greater thematic unity [in Jerusalem) than in the earlier epics" there is "not so much orderliness . . . as the division into four equal chap ters might lead us to suspect." So far none of the attempts to discover a structure in Jerusalem have been willing to recognize Erdman's point. It may well be that time will 267 show that Erdman was wrong, but to the present, all of the attempts to structure Jerusalem on the basis of its four equal parts have proven him correct. The views of one final critic must be considered. Harold Bloom ("Commentary on Jerusalem," The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed., David V. Erdman [New York, 1965], pp. 843-844) finds that the structure of Jerusalem is parallel to the structure of the Book of Ezekiel. He says, It is possible that Blake1s model for Jerusalem was the Book of Ezekiel. . . . The Book of Ezekiel, unlike those of the other prophets, has a highly methodical arrange ment, being divided into two parts of twenty-four chap ters each. Part I is disaster: Jerusalem is besieged, it falls, and the State falls with it. Part II is the painful recovery, in which the people slowly come to regeneration. Looking more closely at each part— the first is subdivided into roughly these divisions: Ezekiel's vision of the Chariot, and his taking up the role of prophet; prophecies of the nations destruction; the wrongdoings of Jerusalem and the punishment that will ensue; the same as to Judah; finally the prophecy that the State must fall. Part II seems to be in three sections: prophecies of the downfall of the heathen nations; prophecies of the redemption of Judah and Israel; a vision of the restoring of Jerusalem, including provisions for a rebuilt Temple. The structure of Blake's Jerusalem has many similarities to this, though not of course to the same degree or in the same way that the Revelation of John bases itself on Ezekiel. Blake's Jerusalem is divided into four equal chapters, each of which depends for its progression on a dialecti cal struggle of contraries. In Chapter I these are Albion and Los, with Albion incarnating the acceptance of chaos and destruction, and Los opposing such accept ance in the name of prophecy and creation. The conflict of forces here is akin to that in the opening quarter of Ezekiel, with Los-Blake in the role of Ezekiel and the English people or Albion in the role of the Jews or Israel. In Blake’s second chapter Los works to create an image of salvation from the mere repetition of Albion's natural history. This is Blake's equivalent of Ezekiel's evolving prophecy of the State's destruction for lack of 268 good works. In his third chapter Blake opposes "Deism," the end product of Albion's history, and the vision of a savior, the Blakean Jesus. The parallel is the next movement of Ezekiel, the prophetic denunciation of Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, Tyre, Sidon, and Egypt, which is the prototype for Blake's attack on Mystery and Nature; indeed Blake's Covering Cherub is borrowed from Ezekiel's denunciation of Tyre. Blake's fourth chapter opposes error and truth directly, out of which confrontation comes a prophecy of the Last Judgment ? Ezekiel's closing chapters are visions of redemption, and of a City and a Temple worthy of that redemption. (pp. 843-844) Fortunately Bloom realizes the limitations of drawing strict parallels for he concludes by saying that "This general parallel between Jerusalem and Ezekiel cannot be taken too far, . . . Yet the broad pattern of resemblance exists, and it accounts, I think, for much of Blake's structural pro cedure in Jerusalem." For the moment, the final word on the structure of Jerusalem must be similar to Bloom's admission before he begins his discussion. He says, The structure of Jerusalem raises many problems, which the poem's critics (this one included) have not been able to solve. Yet the problem may be only that the poem has not had enough accurate and close readers as yet; in time it may seem no more and no less difficult in structure than The Faerie Queene or The Prelude, Works curiously and wonderfully put together but each on a basis not so discursive as it may at first appear. (p. 843) APPENDIX II 269 APPENDIX II Blake changed his mind about many things. His life was one endless odyssey in search of the essential truths of the spirit. He was not afraid to discard a notion if it proved false or inadequate. But his attitude toward priests and kings never varied. Rulers, whether they were religious, political or artistic, always sought to bind the spirit, and he hated them for it. There are hints and portents of this attitude in the gentlest poems in The Songs of Inno cence. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Songs of Experience are full of it. And it becomes the basis of his attack on Bishop Watson in his annotations to Watson1s Apolocrv for the Bible. Watson's Apology is an attack on Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, which appeared from 1793 to 1796. On the very first page of the Apology. Blake has inscribed at various places in the margin: I have not the Charity for the Bishop that he pretends to have for Paine. I believe him to be a State trick ster. / Dishonest Misrepresentation. / Priestly Impu dence. / Contemptible Falsehoods & Detraction. / presump tuous Murderer. Dost thou, 0 Priest, wish thy brother's death when God has preserved him? / Mr. Paine has not extinguish'd, & cannot Extinguish, Moral rectitude; he has Extinguish'd Superstition, which took the Place of Moral Rectitude. (K. 384) On page two Watson says, 271 Men's minds were not prepared, as you suppose, for the commission of all manner of crimes, by any doctrines of the church of Rome, corrupted as I esteem it, but by their not thoroughly believing even that religion. What may not society expect from those, who shall imbibe the principles of your book? (K. 385; italics editor's) To which Blake replies with some venom, I should Expect that the man who wrote this sneaking sentence would be as good an inquisitor as any other priest. (K. 385, italics Blake's) It is strange to find Blake here defending Paine who was an avowed Deist, particularly in the light of his attack on Paine's views in A Vision of the Last Judgment, and of his wholesale rejection of Deism in Jerusalem. But the notes are subtle, and upon closer examination, they are much more carefully controlled than their venom would proclaim them to be. That is, the notes are intended more as an attack on Watson than a defense of Paine. Blake is always careful in the notes to distinguish between what he calls the "Religion of Jesus" and "State Religion," and while he never concedes a point which he considers to be vital to the "Religion of Jesus," he makes every effort to show his sympathy for every point that Paine scores against priestcraft and "State Reli gion." Every victory over the priests, who (as we shall soon see) have Satan for their God, is a victory for Jesus, no matter who is the victor. But more pertinent is the notion of the priesthood which Blake exhibits in these remarks. The Bishop is a "priest," a "State trickster/' as "good an inquisitor as any; 272 ; other priest," and a "Murderer.” He is "Dishonest," "sneak ing," "Presumptuous," "Impudent," and speaks "Falsehood." The conception of the priest as oppressor and tyrant, which is hinted at here, becomes explicit in Milton, where Milton accuses Satan: "Thy purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy Churches "Is to impress on men the fear of death, to teach "Trembling St fear, terror, constriction, abject selfishness." (Milton 38:37-39) A subtle and insidious example of how Satan uses the fear of death and an appeal to selfishness to snare a victim and make him a slave to the king and priest appears in The Everlasting Gospel— one of Blake's last works. It was prob ably written in 1818 only a short time after he finished engraving Jerusalem, and it is followed by only one other short work— The Ghost of Abel. There, in Blake's interpre tive rendering of the Gospel story of Satan tempting Christ in the wilderness, we can see that his insight into the nature of the priesthood and kingship and his hatred of it remained to the end. "Come," said Satan, "come away, "I'll soon see if you'll obey! "John for disobedience bled, "But you can turn these stones to bread. "God's high king & God's high Priest "Shall Plant their Glories in your breast "If Caiaphas you will obey, "If Herod you with bloody Prey "Feed with the sacrifice, & be "Obedient, fall down, worship me." (K. 749) 273 ; This passage, which is remarkably close to the spirit of the Gospel accounts and in many places echoes them directly, is an excellent example of Blake's insight into the Biblical narrative. It presents Satan as a subtle and masterful rhetorician, and the economy and cogency of Satan's insinu ations and logic demonstrates that Blake was well aware of other such arguments in the Bible— particularly the tempta tion of Eve in Genesis Chapter Three, the contest between Satan and God in Job Chapter One, and the temptation of Christ in the Gospels, which Blake is rendering for us here. Satan begins by announcing his purpose— to see if Jesus will obey. He is, however, careful to avoid any suggestion of what Jesus is to do or whom he is to obey. If he had been too explicit too early, he would have lost the argument immediately. Instead, he goes on to insinuate what would happen to Jesus if he did not obey. But instead of declar ing openly the consequences of disobedience, he introduces the case of John the Baptist. The introduction of John at this point is masterful. It not only predisposes his victim to obey by suggesting obliquely that Jesus cannot afford not to obey (for the consequence of disobedience is death), it also gives a strong hint as to who should be obeyed without actually naming them. Anyone familiar with the story of John's death, as Jesus obviously was, knows that John died at Herod's hand for opposing his marriage to Herodias, the wife of Philip, Herod’s brother. But Satan, not yet ready 274 ; to allow Jesus to make the identification, immediately snatches Jesus back by flattering him and by turning his mind from the consequences of disobedience as seen in John to the possibilities for obedience in himself. Satan says, "But you can turn these stones to bread." At first this line would seem to be a non sequitur; there does not seem to be any logical relationship between it and the previous line, and the absence of any transition obscures the rela tionship. If, however, we know something of the biblical account of the temptation, and something of Blake's ideas about the "spiritual" and the "corporeal,1 1 we can see its diabolical significance and its subtle relationship to the line before. In the biblical accounts (Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13, and Luke 4:1-13) the temptation always occurs after Jesus has been baptized by John and after the Holy Spirit has descended upon him out of heaven. He then goes into the wilderness, so the Evangelists tell us, at the express com mand of the Spirit. ("And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness," so Mark puts it.) Also, the temp tation comes before Jesus formally assumes his ministry and is a kind of preparation for it. In the temptation, he is faced with some basic choices as to the type of ministry he will try to fulfill. After forty days of fasting in the wilderness, Satan appears to Jesus and suggests that he turn; the stones into bread that he might satisfy his hunger. Two 275 principles are at stake here. Satan is tempting Jesus to put the things of the body above the things of the spirit, and he is tempting Jesus to demonstrate his power as the Son of God. Both of the notions which Satan is here advocat ing— the primacy of what Blake calls the “Corporeal Body" and the need for "Demonstration"— Blake associates with "State Religion" and all its villainous adherents. The first denies the existence of the "Spiritual Body," the sec ond denies the necessity of faith and "Vision," and both lead to bondage, and ultimately to Ulro or hell. So, in calling upon Christ to turn the stones into bread, something which is innocent enough in the light of Christ1s need for food, Satan is cunningly trying to trap Jesus into an action which will align him with established authority and damn him. The power of the temptation comes from the fact that both Satan and Jesus know that Jesus has the power to per form the miracle, but Satan is calling that power into ques tion. But Jesus knows that a demonstration of his power at such a time, under such conditions and for such a purpose would be to fall prey to the "Selfhood." The insidiousness of the temptation is in the fact that there does not seem to be any connection between it and what has gone before. Satan has done his best to obscure the relationship between this seemingly innocent suggestion and the horrible conse quences which will ensue whether Jesus complies or not. In short, it does not seem to be a temptation at all. I In the next line, Satan announces the benefits which would accrue from obedience and, for the first time, intro- ; duces the villainous objects of that obedience. But he does not introduce them as villains, nor does he suggest specifi cally who they are. The masters whom Satan is inviting Jesus to obey are presented as "'God’s high king & God's high Priest,1" After all, if Jesus is, as he claims to be, the Son of God, he should not blanch at the mention of God's king and God's priest. The gift which Satan offers Jesus, and which is offered before he makes the conditions of the gift specifically known, is that they "'Shall Plant their Glories in your breast.'" What is not immediately apparent is that Satan has things reversed. If Jesus is the Son of God, he is also God, Divinity incarnate, and for Jesus to allow king and priest to "'Plant their Glories'" in him would be to deny his own divinity. To place himself at their mercy would be to declare them God, which is, of course, exactly what Satan wants. Once again these lines become clearer when we seek out their source in the Bible. There we read: And again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and he saith unto him, "All these will I give thee. ..." (Matthew 4:8-9) The "Glories," then, which Satan is speaking of, are the glories of world rulership. And if king and priest can i offer Christ world dominion, they must have it, think they ! have it, or at least desire it. And here Blake’s conception of king and priest begins clearly to emerge. But Blake has also suggested a neat irony in these lines. Dominion, from one point of view, may be surrounded with a certain glory, but, as we shall soon see, here it is built on obedience which leads to bondage, and on bloody sacrifice, which leads to death. These Blake repeatedly points out, are no glories, and if they are, they are the glories of the heathen and not the glories of Jesus' kingdom, for "The Glory of Christian ity is to Conquer by Forgiveness" (Jerusalem 52, prose). At last, Satan introduces Jesus to those he has so far only hinted at and to the conditions for receiving their glories. When we find out who the king and priest are, we of course also discover that they are not God's king and priest at all, but Herod and Caiaphas, the king and the priest of "State Religion." The conditions, which are pre sented quite as a matter of course, as if their was nothing unusual about them, are to obey Caiaphas the priest and to feed Herod the king with bloody sacrifices. The speech trails off rhetorically at the end, and the anticlimactic ending contrasts starkly with the disgusting conditions pre sented. Then almost as an afterthought Satan adds, “'Sc be obedient, fall down, worship me.’" The "be obedient,” which in one sense lies at the center of the whole temptation, is so quiet after the horrible vision of feeding Herod with i ' 278: I i bloody sacrifice, that it insinuates itself into the mind ! almost unnoticed. No one who had followed Satan's argument so far, and who had accepted it, would object to this stipu-; i lation. The next phrase, "fall down," which could easily be! read as a further qualification of obedience, actually points forward to the last and most fiendish demand— "wor ship me." But the change has been so gradual, the movement of the rhetoric so subtle, that we are not at all surprised at where it has led us, until with a shock we recognize that obedience to Herod and Caiaphas— "'God's high king & God's high Priest1"— is actually worshiping Satan. It matters little whether man falls under the tyranny of priest and king through cunning, which Blake sees in Bishop Watson, or by persuasion, as in Satan's temptation of Christ, or by force, as in the passage from Milton; the re sult is the same— slavery. And Blake hates it. A P P E N D I X III 279 APPENDIX III An absolute chronology of Blake1s writings will prob ably never be established. The dates of composition/ even of etching and publication, for The Pour Zoas and Jerusalem cannot be determined with absolute certainty. Nevertheless, a great deal of time has been given the problem by the scholars, and although they frequently disagree, they all come to similar conclusions. Of the dating of The Four Zoas Geoffrey Keynes says, Another title [than Vala or The Four Zoas] found on the back of a separate drawing may possibly refer to this poem, as suggested by Max Plowman. It runs as follows: "The Bible of Hell, in Nocturnal Visions collected. Vol. I. Lambeth." The division of The Four Zoas into nine Nights, with this title, was certainly suggested by Young's Night Thoughts, which Blake was illustrating at the same period. If Plowman's conjecture be correct, it would follow that Blake conceived the idea for The Four Zoas some years before it was actually written, for he remarks in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no" [cf. K. 158] . The theme of The Four Zoas is a development of the cosmic fantasy, already given expression in The Book of Urizen and its sequels. Blake seems never to have carried out any final revi sion of the poem and he never etched it on copper-plates in the manner of the other symbolic works. . . . The date 1797 on the title-page may, as suggested by Sampson [The Poetical Works (1905)], represent the date at which Blake began to make a fair copy, the composition having been begun a year or two before; or it may have been in this year that he decided to call what he had written of The Bible of Hell by the name of Vala. Extensive revisions were made during the Felpham period, 1800-1803, and fur ther alterations may have been made at other times. (K. 897-898) 280 281 Erdman's textual notes to The Four Zoas in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (pp. 737-739) give a thorough but concise analysis of the dates of composition of The Four Zoas. Erdman extends the period of composition to about 1807. However, both Keynes and Erdman agree that the major work of composition and revision was probably over by 1804 or earlier. After that date Blake may have worked on the poem in a haphazard way. G. E. Bentley, Jr., and Martin K. Nurmi (A Blake Bib liography [Minneapolis, 1964], pp. 35-36) essentially agree with Keynes and Erdman, but they extend the period of revi sion slightly. They say, The first draft of Vala was probably written about 1795, . . . [I]t was apparently transcribed . . . and to indi cate that the work was complete Blake wrote "1797" firmly on the title page. During the next five years he revised it fairly thoroughly, and in 1802 he copied the last seven and one half Nights out again. . . . [AJbout 1804 he rewrote Nights VIIB, VIII and IX, . . . Then about 1805 he became dissatisfied with Night VIII and rewrote it again. . . . Finally, during about the next three years, he made patch work revisions throughout much of the poem. . . . Probably after 1808 Blake made relative ly few changes. The dates of composition of The Four Zoas are therefore about 1795-1808. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., (Innocence and Experience; An intro duction to Blake [New Haven, 1964], pp. 143-147) does not extend the period of composition of The Four Zoas quite so far. He identifies two versions and some late additions. The first version, he thinks, may have been begun as early as 1795 but was not begun in earnest until 1797. The second version, he thinks, was begun and completed during Blake's 2 82 stay at Felpham, 1800-1803. The latest additions to the poem, he thinks, were made in 1805. H. M. Margoliouth (William Blake [London, 1951], p. 113) allows for even a shorter period of composition. He says, . . . that he [Blake] can hardly have begun The Four Zoas before 1797. . . . The date [1797 on the British Museum MS.], on analogy with Milton and Jerusalem, may only indicate the year when the poem was begun, but it may safely be assumed that he had written at least seven Nights before going to Felpham in 1800. He took the MS. with him to Felpham and there, in the light of develop ing ideas and new visions, he made extensive additions and alterations. At a second revision less extensive changes were made in pencil. Mr. Margoliouth does not clearly say when these later revi sions were made, but he seems to imply that Blake had aban doned the idea of completing The Four Zoas before he began work on Milton and Jerusalem in 1804. Establishing dates of composition for Jerusalem is less troubled and more definite. Keynes says, Jerusalem was the last considerable work which Blake exe cuted by his method of etching. . . . The date on the title-page is 1804, but this may have been when the con ception of the poem was first formed in Blake's mind. Most of the work was probably executed after the comple tion of Milton in 1808. Evidence derived from the water marks of the existing copies shows that the printing of none of them can have begun before 1818 or have been finished until 1820. (K. 917-918) Erdman (Poetry and Prose, p. 730) presents the problems in greater detail, but comes to essentially the same conclu sion. He says, Jerusalem was etched and in present form largely com posed after Milton, though their "1804" title-pages 283 suggest some overlapping. Some pages were written and perhaps a few were etched, the Preface for instance, dur ing the enthusiasm of the post-Felpham years (though all the etching, with the possible exception of the title- page, is later than June 1805). After his 1809 Exhibi tion, Blake may have turned to his two epics simultan eously, but he first completed and etched Milton; the final text of Jerusalem can hardly have been completed before 1815. Most of the etching was probably done in 1815-20, but the deletion-marked pages such as the Preface may survive from an earlier etching. Proof copies of Plates 28, 40 [45] and 56 were made on paper dated 1802, though these plates cannot have been made that early. The fact that Jerusalem shows much more var iation from plate to plate than Milton, however, almost certainly signifies a much longer span of composition and production. True, it was Blake's conscious aim to achieve breadth and variety of graphic and verbal effects befitting an epic, but time as well as stylistic choice seems to have caused some of the differences among the plates. Bentley and Nurmi (p. 34) put the major portion of the composition of Jerusalem much earlier, although they suggest that final version was not complete until 1820. They say. It seems likely . . . that Blake thought Jerusalem com plete in 1804, and began the etching then; revised and finished the poem in sixty plates by 1807; and then re vised and expanded it to one hundred plates which were not completed until 1820. It is clear, however, from what Bentley and Nurmi say that Jerusalem was not begun until the major work on The Four Zoas was complete, and that more than half of Jerusalem was written after The Four Zoas had been abandoned. Margoliouth says simply, "The title-page, like that of Milton, is dated 1804, but no existing copy is on paper of an earlier date than 1818, and that is probably when its engraving was finished." 284: Whatever the differences of opinion may bd over the dating of The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, there seems to be at least two points on which all agree. One, The Four Zoas was written first, Milton second and Jerusalem last. Two, the composition of the earliest probably began around 1797 (perhaps as early as 1795) and the composition of the last probably lasted until 1820. In all, that allows for a span of 22 years (for Blake, almost a third of his life time) from the beginning of the first to the completion of the last— which is ample time for someone as intellectually active and sensitive as Blake to undergo several important mind changes. What is more important, however, is the fact that these years contain the Felpham years, 1800-1803, which by common agreement, seem to have been crucial years in Blake's intellectual and spiritual development. Although we know little about them beyond the sedition trial and the conflicts with Hayley, which are reflected in the letters he wrote during this time, there can be little doubt that they contained some other crisis experience of far-reaching con sequence . Something happened to Blake1s spiritual and psy chological disposition which caused him to revise his con ceptions of man and the world, of the fall and redemption. Much of the brash revolutionary fervor of his early days was gone, so that in the Preface to Jerusalem he could write "I am perhaps the most sinful of men" (K. 621). On November 22, 1802, Blake ends a letter to Thomas Butts with these words: ! 285 i And now let me finish with assuring you that, Tho' X have heen very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again emerged into the light of day; I still & shall to Etern ity Embrace Christianity and Adore him who is the Express image of God; but I have travel*d thro1 Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion. I have Conquer'd, and shall still Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & in the Abysses of the Accuser. (K. 816) The evidences of the change caused by this experience (the exact nature of which we can only guess) appear in Milton and particularly in Jerusalem. Whatever the experience may have been, it seems to have led Blake closer to the concep tions of orthodox Christianity. Bentley and Nurmi evaluate the effect of the experience in much the same way when they say of the first few years following Blake's return to London from Felpham, "During the next few years his reli gious and mythological ideas underwent a profound Christian change. ..." (p. 35). Bentley and Nurmi also suggest that the late revisions of The Four Zoas reflect these Christian notions. I suspect that a study of the late revisions of The Four Zoas would also reveal a changing mythical system. However, the first real change in Blake's perspective and mythological system appears in Milton, which stands in so many ways as a bridge between The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The advances which Blake made in Milton he then consolidated and developed in Jerusalem. BIBLIOGRAPHY 286 BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Hazard. Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision. | Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955. 1 ______________. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter ! Poems. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963.: Altizer, Thomas J. J. The New Apocalypse: The Radical j Christian Vision of William Blake. East Lansing: j Michigan State University Press, 196 7. i _____________________ . "William Blake and the Role of Myth ! in the Radical Christian Vision," The Centennial Re- j view of Arts and Sciences, IX (1965), 461-482. I Ansari, Agloob Ahmad. "Blake and the Kabbalah," In j William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin j H. Rosenfeld. Providence: Brown University Press, j 1969. j I I Bainton, Roland H. Early Christianity. New York: Anvil j Books, 1960. __________________. "The Left Wing of the Reformation," Journal of Religion, XXI (1941), 124-134. ______________ . The Reformation of the Sixteenth Cen tury. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952. Beeching, H. C. "Blake's Religious Lyrics," London: Eng- lish Association. Essays and Studies, III (1912), 136-152. Beer, John. Blake's Humanism. New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1968. Bender, Harold S. "The Anabaptist Vision," In The Re covery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hersh^ berger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1957. Bentley, Gerald E., Jr. "William Blake and the Alchemical Philosophers." Unpublished B. Litt. dissertation. Merton College, Oxford, 1954. 287 Bentley, Gerald E., Jr., and Martin K. Nurmi. A Blake Bibr- lioqraphy: Annotated Lists of Works, Studies, and Blakeana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964. Benz, Ernst. Ecclesia Spiritualis. Stuttgart: W, Kohlr-. j hammer, 1934. Berger, Pierre. William Blake: Poet and Mystic, trans. D. H. Conner. London: Chapmand and Hall, 1914, i Blackstone, Bernard. English Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge : University Press, 1949. ( Blanke, Fritz. "Anabaptism and The Reformation." In The j Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hersh berger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1957. ; Bloom, Harold. "Commentary." In The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965. ______________. Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company,: Inc., 1963. i Blunt, Anthony. The Art of William Blake. New York: Columbia, 1959. j Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Creation and Fall: A Theological • Interpretation of Genesis 1-3, trans. John C. Fletcher.] London: SCM Press Ltd., 1959. j I Bottrall, Margaret. The Divine Image: A Study of Blake's j Interpretation of Christianity. Rome: Edizioni di j Storia e Letteratura, 1950. j | Bronowski, Jacob. William Blake: A Man Without a Mask. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1943. _____________ . William Blake and the Age of Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965. Cook, F. C., ed. The Bible Commentary: New Testament. Vol. III. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas & Symbols of William Blake. Providence: Brown University Press, 1965. 289 Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Sym bols. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924. Daugherty, James Henry. William Blake. New York: Viking Press, 1960. Davies, J. G. The Theology of William Blake. London: The Clarendon Press, 1948. Edersheim, Alfred. The Life and Times of Jesus The Messiah. 2 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899. England, Martha Winburn. “Blake and The Hymns of Charles Wesley," The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXX (1966), 1-26, 93-112, 153-168, 251-264. Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet against Empire: A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954. _______________ . "Blake's Jerusalem: Plate 3 Fully Re stored," Studies in Bibliography, XVIII (1965), 281- _______________ , ed. A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. ________________, ed. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965. . "'Terrible Blake in His Pride': An Essay on The Everlasting Gospel." In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Fredrick A. Pottle, eds. Fredrick W. Hills and Harold Bloom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Farrar, Fredric W. The Life of Christ. New York: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1900. Fisch, Harold. Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature^ London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Friedman, Robert. "The Doctrine of the Two Worlds." In The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hershberger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1957. 290 Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 1957. ______________ . "Blake After Two Centuries," In Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Ltd., 1963. _______________. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Boston: Beacon Press, 1947. ______________ . Introduction, Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Northrop Frye. New York: Modern Library, 1953. . "The Keys to the Gates." In Some British Romantics: A Collection of Essays, eds. James V. Logan, John E. Jordan, and Northrop Frye. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966. Gardner, Stanley. Infinity on the Anvil. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954. Gaunt, William. Arrows of Desire. London: Museum Press, 1956. ' Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. Rev. ed. Ruthren Todd. London: J. M. Dent, 1942. GiIlham, D. G. Blake's Contrary States: The 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' as Dramatic Poems. Cam- bndge: At the University Press, 1966. Gleckner, Robert F; "Blake's Thel and the Bible," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXIV (November^ 1960), 513-5 80. _________________ The Piper and The Bard: A Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ,1959. t Harper, George. "The Divine Tetrad in Blake's Jerusalem." In William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Providence: Brown University Press, 1969. ______________ . The Neoplatonism of William Blake. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. Heering, G. J. The Fall of Christianity. New York: Fel lowship Publications, 1943. 291 Hill, Juanita V. "Blake and the Bible." Unpublished mas ter's thesis. Blommington: Indiana University, 1936. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Innocence and Experience: An Introduc tion to Blake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Hirst, Desiree. Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake. London: Eyre and Spottis- woode Ltd., 1964. The Holy Bible. Authorized version of 1611. Hungerford, E. B. Shores of Darkness. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. Jacobus, M. W., Edward E. Nourse, Andrew C. Unos, eds. A Standard Bible Dictionary. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1926. James, Laura Dewitt. William Blake: The Finger on the Furnace. New York: Vantage Press, 1956. Jones, Rufus. Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914, Kaufman, Gordon D. "Some Theological Emphases of the Early Swiss Anabaptists," Mennonite Quarterly Review, XXV (April 1951), 75-99. Kemper, Claudette. "The Interlinear Drawings in Blake's Jerusalem," The Bulletin of the New York Public Li brary, LXIV (May 1959), 588-594. Keynes, Geoffery, ed. The Complete Writings of William Blake. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Kiralis, Karl. "Intellectual Symbolism in William Blake's Later Prophetic Writings." In Discussions of William Blake, ed. John E. Grant. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1961. ___________. "The Theme and Structure of William Blake's Jerusalem." In The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1957. Krahn, Cornelius. "Prolegomena to an Anabaptist Theology," Mennonite Quarterly Review, XXIV (January 1950), 5-11. 29 2 Kreider, Robert. ''The Anabaptists and, The State." In The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hersh berger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1957. * Littell, Franklin H. "The Anabaptist Concept of the Church." In The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hershberger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1957. ___________________ . The Origins of Sectarian Protestant^ ism. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964. Margolionth, H. M. William Blake. London: Oxford Univer-^ sity Press, 1951. Miner, Paul. "Visions in The Darkson Air: Aspects of Blake's Biblical Symbolism.” In William Blake: Es says for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H, Rosenfeld. Providence: Brown University Press, 1969. "William Blake's 'Divine Analogy’," Criticism, III (Winter 1961), 46-61. Morton, Arthur Leslie. The Everlasting Gospel. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958. Murry, John Middleton. William Blake. New York: McGraw^ Hill Book Company, 1933. Nathan, Norman. "Blake and Nontheism," PMLA, LXXV (1960), 147. Nicoll, Allardyce. William Blake and His Poetry. London: G. G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1922. Oyer, John S. "The Reformers Oppose the Anabaptist Theol ogy." In The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hershberger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1957. Percival, Milton O. William Blake's Circle of Destiny. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Pinto, Vivian De Sola, ed. The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1957. Plowman, Max. An Introduction to the Study of Blake. New York: Dutton, 1927. 293 Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 1968. Rose, Edward J. ’ ’ The Structure of Blake's Jerusalem,1 1 Bucknell Review, IX (May 1963), 35-54. ______________ . "The Symbolism of the Opened Center and Poetic Theory in Blake's Jerusalem," Studies in Eng lish Literature, V (1965), 587-606. Rudd, Margaret. Organized Innocence: The Story of Blake's Prophetic Books. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956. Saurat, Denis. Blake and Modern Thought. New York: MacVeagh Press, 1929. Schorer, Mark. William Blake: The Politics of Vision. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1946. Smithson, R. J. The Anabaptists. London: James Clarke & Company, Ltd., 1935. Spicer, Harold. "Biblical Sources of William Blake's America," Ball State University Forum, VIII, No. 3 (1967), 23-29. ______________ . "The Chariot of Fire: A Study of William Blake's Use of Biblical Typology in The Minor Prophe cies." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Indiana Uni versity, 1962. Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Todd, Ruthren. Tracks in the Snow. London: The Gray Walls PressT 1946. Troeltsch, Ernst. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. 2 vols. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931. Weber, Hans Rudi. "Laity in The Apostolic Church," Ecumen^ ical Review, X (April 1958), 2 86-293. Wenger, John C. "The Biblicism of the Anabaptists." In The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hershberger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1957. 294 White, Helen C. The Mysticism of William Blake. Madison: University of Wisconsin press, 1927. White, Wayne. ’ ’ William Blake: Mystic or Visionary?" Col lege Language Association- Journal, IX (1966), 284-288. Wicksteed, Joseph H. William Blake's Jerusalem. London: Trianon Press, 1954. Williams, George H., and Angel M. Mergal, eds. Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers. London: SCM Press Ltd., 1957. Wilson, Mona. The Life of William Blake. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1927; rev. ed., 1948. Witcutt, W. P. William Blake: A Psychological Study. London: Hollis & Carter, 1946. Wiswedel, Wilhel. "The Inner and The Outer Word,” Menno nite Quarterly Review, XXVI (July 1952), 3:171-191. Yoder, John H. ’ ’ The Prophetic Dissent of the Anabaptists." In The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, ed. Guy F. Hershberger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1957. Young, Robert. Analytical Concordance to the Bible. , New York: T. K. Funk and Company, 1931.

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Creator Unruh, Donald John (author)

Core Title Jerusalem: The Primitive Christian Vision Of William Blake

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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Language English

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Advisor Schulz, Max F. (committee chair), Eggenschwiler, David L. (committee member), Larue, Gerald A. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-416500

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