William Blake vs The World Chapter 4. WITHOUT CONTRARIES IS NO PROGRESSION
Author: John Higgs Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2021 Review Date: 2023-2-23 Status:📚
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The contrasting positions he called reason and energy are, Blake explained, the root of good and evil. Passively obeying reason is good, which creates heaven, while activity springing from energy is evil, which creates hell. This sounds at first to be a simple dualist position, in which the world is divided into positive and negative things. But Blake also claims that: ‘Energy is Eternal Delight.’ The energy he had just defined as the source of evil is also portrayed as a lovely thing. Blake was uninterested in campaigning for one side or the other. Instead, he argued for the necessity of both. Even today, most writers position themselves on one side of a divide and argue passionately that their perspective is the correct or most valid one.
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Single-focused studies like these are a hallmark of Western thought. They are predicated on the belief that, in order to understand something, you need to focus on it, isolate it from external factors, and then take it apart to see what it is made of.
Note: Opposite if range
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Blake eschews this singular approach. His thinking often has more in common with Chinese thought, which examines how things interact as part of a larger system. As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching in the sixth century BC: When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other. For Blake, as for Lao Tzu, things are defined by their context. A military historian may study war for their entire life, but he will never truly understand its horror unless he also understands peace. The value of good health is only really apparent to those who have been seriously ill. If you are blind to the greater context when you try to understand something, then you can never truly appreciate why things behave as they do.
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Note that Blake is not trying to remain neutral. His position is not a proto-postmodern belief that all perspectives are equally valid. He is quite prepared to call out one side as good, and the other evil. Instead, his position is that both sides of the clash are necessary, because there is no such thing as light without dark or hot without cold. For Blake, the conflict between these divides is the fuel that moves the universe. Any view of the world must include them, because a universe without these dynamics simply couldn’t exist. To try to solve problems by favouring one side and dismissing the other is to fail to understand how the world works.
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Arguments, division and tribalism are, of course, a source of hurt and confusion. It is unsurprising that most people choose a side and want to see that side triumph. They long to enjoy the outbreak of peace that would – supposedly – arrive after their chosen enemies had been wiped away. But from Blake’s perspective, a scenario like this would result in a static, unchanging world devoid of joy or surprise. Without the energy of clashing perspectives, the universe would ground to a halt and die. Blake did not think, however, that we were always trapped in a state of perpetual conflict. It was possible to find respite from these squabbles. This was the state he called Beulah, the ‘threefold vision’ we encountered earlier.
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Blake introduces the state of Beulah in both of his major works, Milton and Jerusalem, with the line: ‘There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True’. A contrariety is defined as opposition or inconsistency between two things. This place, he explains, is ‘a pleasant lovely Shadow / Where no dispute can come’. The inability for dispute to exist in the state of Beulah is not because one contrary position has been wiped away, but because in the state of Grace that typifies Beulah there is no antagonism felt towards either extreme. They both exist, are recognised, and are simply accepted.
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Rationally, we struggle with the notion that two contrary positions can both be true. Logic tells us that this is an either/or situation. The idea that the earth is flat, for example, and the idea that the earth is round, are contradictory statements that can’t both be true. It must be one or the other, and we are usually pretty sure we know which. There are, however, at least two possible ways for contradictory statements to both be true.
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The first of these is only possible at very small scales, at the level of reality from which our everyday world emerges, in the strange world of quantum mechanics. In the quantum realm, subatomic particles can be in two different places at the same time and exhibit other logic-defying behaviour. This intensely odd quality of the small-scale world is usually illustrated with the ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ thought experiment, which features a cat in a box that is said to be both alive and dead at the same time. According to quantum mechanics, these ‘Contrarieties are equally True’. It is only when the box is opened, and the cat is observed, that normal logic returns. At this point the cat can be said to be either alive or dead, but certainly not both.
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In many interpretations of quantum theory, it is the presence of a conscious observer that turns reality into something fixed, comprehensible and useful. Before that, all that exists is a cloud of probability, an indistinct sea of potential that obeys its own laws despite not physically existing as we would understand it. The way in which this ineffable cosmos is transformed into a fixed, logical world can be said to be an act of creation, in which the definite appears out of the indefinite. A process such as this is central to Blake’s own personal philosophy. It is the work of one of the key characters in his mythology. His name is Urizen.
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Urizen is the personification of reason. He is the intellect that creates law, he is controlling and associated with language, and it is he who constructs the human-scale world of rationality and logic in which contrary positions cannot both be physically true. Urizen is the conscious observer that forces Schrödinger’s cat to become either alive or dead. In The Book of Urizen (1794), Blake has Urizen describe his creation of the solid world while he was being buffeted by the storms that shake the realm of pure potential: Inwards, into a deep world within: A void immense, wild dark & deep, Where nothing was: Natures wide womb. And self balanc’d stretch’d o’er the void. I alone, even I! the winds merciless. Bound; but condensing, in torrents. They fall &fall: strong I repell’d. The vast waves, & arose on the waters. A wide world of solid obstruction
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From this new-built material world, Urizen calls for a tent to cover the definite world from the great seething void from which everything came: “Spread a Tent, with strong curtains around them, “Let cords & stakes bind in the Void. That Eternals may no more behold them. ”They began to weave curtains of darkness. They erected large pillars around the Void. With golden hooks fastend in the pillars. With infinite labour the Eternals. A woof wove, and called it Science. This ‘woof’, or woven cover called Science, was the creation of Urizen’s reason. It hid the primordial void from the objective world he had created, just as the quantum realm of indefinite potential remains hidden from us now. Urizen then wrote his laws down in a great brass book.
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Urizen is sometimes described as casting nets of religion, which he used to ensnare people in his reasoning and laws. His laws demand obedience, and their restricting, controlling nature filled Blake with horror. They reduce infinite possibility down to a single fixed certainty, and offer only: One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure, One King, one God, one Law.
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The Ancient of Days, one of Blake’s most famous images, shows Urizen in this act of creation. He is leaning out of a golden orb with his long white beard buffeted by the storm winds of the dark, cloudy unformed void, and he reaches down with an outstretched compass to measure the solid world he is building. Here, Blake’s use of the compass owes a debt to the freemasonry movement. Freemasons call God the ‘Great Architect’ of the universe and use a compass as his symbol. The primary art practised by Urizen is architecture.
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The scientist Isaac Newton takes the place of Urizen in another of Blake’s most famous paintings. He is shown intently focused on measuring a circle on a scroll of paper with a similar pair of outstretched compasses. The primal void that Newton inhabits makes it look as if he is under the ocean, sat on a coral rock, yet both Newton and the paper are dry. The environment is indistinct, dark and strangely primal, due in part to the experimental printing technique that Blake used for this work. It stands in sharp contrast to the clean, clear lines on the paper that Newton is so deeply focused on. If any modern artist were to attempt to visualise the shift from the probabilistic clouds of the quantum world to the objective certainty of the world as we perceive it, they would be hard pressed to improve on this.
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Newton’s intense focus on the mathematical shapes he is drawing is intended as an attack on the Newtonian worldview – his narrow focus makes him unaware of the larger, organic, mysterious environment in which he works. Blake recognised that Urizen’s reason could create, but only by abstracting and dividing, and only then by becoming blind to what he was creating from. The circle he draws is finite, a limitation suggested by both explanations for the etymology of the name Urizen. The name implies both ‘Your Reason’ and ‘horizon’ – ‘horizon’ being a word derived from the Greek ‘to limit’.
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Blake’s Urizen resembles an entity from Gnostic thought called the Demiurge. According to the Gnostics, the Demiurge is the creator of the material universe and, because he is the creator, he assumes that he is God. In this, however, the Demiurge is mistaken. There is something much greater and more fundamental behind this figure, which in The Ancient of Days is depicted as the golden orb that Urizen leans out of. Because the Demiurge is focused on the physical universe he is creating, he has his back to this greater power and is unable to see it. For those of us who are inside the physical world of creation, the Demiurge can block this pure light, making this creator a negative and harmful figure.
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The idea of the Demiurge first appears in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, and it became increasingly influential in Gnostic sects before the early Christian Church declared it a heresy. Different Gnostic texts disagreed about why the Demiurge mistakenly believed himself to be God. Some said he was misguided, ignorant or malevolent. Others argued that he was quite mad. As heresies go, ‘God exists but he is mad’ is pretty extreme.
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Blake describes Urizen as being, like the Gnostic Demiurge, the ‘Creator of men, mistaken Demon of heaven’. He equates him with the ‘jealous god’ of the Old Testament. Because this figure is only the creator of the material world, the status of ‘god’ that the Bible grants him is a delusion of grandeur. His association with matter rather than soul in part explains Blake’s claim about his true status: ‘Urizen is Satan’, he wrote in his epic poem Milton. The idea that Blake equated both the God of the Old Testament and Satan himself with the same character sounds at first like the worst of heresies, if not straight up blasphemy. Once we understand more fully the nature of Urizen, however, it may not seem quite so strange.
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Many mystics and religions over the centuries have talked about a fundamental void similar to the one described by Blake. It has been given various different names, such as Brahman or the Tao. Blake gave this ocean of formless potential the name Udan-Adan. He repeatedly refers to it as being found at a scale too small for normal human perception, which further supports the association with the quantum realm. In Milton, for example, he claims that all spaces larger than a globule of blood exist as creations of our mind – a strange notion that we will return to later. The nature of spaces on a smaller scale than this, however, is very different: And every Space smaller than a Globule of Mans blood. opens. Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow: The idea that the delights of Eternity are found at extremely small scales is one he keeps returning to: Thou percievest the Flowers put forth their precious Odours! And none can tell how from so small a center comes such sweets. Forgetting that within that Center Eternity expands. This is another of Blake’s ideas that can also be found in Taoism. In a modern translation of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that: The Tao can’t be perceived. Smaller than an electron, it contains uncountable galaxies.
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In the scientifically minded twenty-first century, the idea that there is a strange world entirely unlike our normal reality at scales too small for us to see has been readily accepted. The microchips our society runs on, for example, rely on our understanding of quantum mechanics to function. This was not the case in the eighteenth century, when such ideas belonged to mysticism and philosophical speculation. We may be unable to perceive this realm, but Blake’s description of Beulah suggests that there is solace to be gained from thinking in its terms.
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If we are looking for a modern, scientific concept we can equate with the unformed void beyond our material universe, out of which Urizen creates our world through an act of intellectual reason, then the quantum realm is an obvious candidate. As we’ve noted this is, like Beulah, ‘a place where Contrarieties are equally True’. Because Beulah is a respite from the limited, rational world created by Urizen, it makes sense that it has qualities that Urizen’s world lacks. Blake’s claim that we can experience Beulah, then, suggests that we are not totally ensnared in the rational world of Urizen’s making, and that it is possible to move our awareness outside of its nets and snares.
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Because Urizen’s sense of himself as a creator god is built on the denial that there is anything outside of him, he finds this idea extremely threatening and he uses all the logic at his disposal to ridicule it. Urizen, it’s important to remember, is a personification of the rational aspects of our minds. Biologically, he is closely related to the default mode network, the top-down efficient network that cauterises chaotic imagination. It is Urizen who has built our ego in his own image. What he likes above all other things is the idea that he is right, because this takes far less mental effort than understanding error.
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All this brings us to another ‘place where Contrarieties are equally True’, which can give us insights into the nature of Beulah. Happily, this is away from the strange, inhuman quantum worlds and a place which we are all familiar with from everyday life: the immaterial world of the mind.
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Here we need to recognise that the contrarieties that Blake talks about are nothing more solid than ideas. The idea that the world is flat and the idea that the world is round are both real ideas, regardless of how accurately they correlate with the actual shape of the world. These ideas are not reality itself. Instead, they are models of reality that we have constructed in our minds. They are what we believe reality to be.
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A mental model of the real world can be extremely useful. It allows us to make predictions and helps us decide how to act. But a model is, by definition, a smaller, simplified version of the thing that it was built to represent. It will not always match what it models exactly. The chances are that we won’t notice this, however, because our ideas are so convincing. When we are presented with the contrasting ideas that the world is flat and the world is round, for example, we feel certain that we are correct when we think that one of these is true. In reality, both are crude approximations. To the best of our understanding, the world has a complex topology in four-dimensional spacetime, which is warped by the gravity of the sun. Visualising its true shape is an extraordinarily complicated problem. It is not surprising, in these circumstances, that we build simplified models in our mind and mistake these models for reality. But as the Zen philosopher Alan Watts explained, the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal.
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For most of our day-to-day needs, the simple idea that the world is flat is all we need to get by, because this model works well enough for us to find our way around. If we are planning long-distance travel or arranging a call with someone in a different continent, then the flat world model will prove to be insufficient and we need to use the slightly more complex idea that the world is round. If we wanted to send a satellite on a never-ending circuit orbiting both the earth and the sun, neither model would be sufficient, and we’d have to think in terms of four-dimensional spacetime.
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Living inside our mental models is so seductively convincing that it can be a shock to realise that they are not the real world. A good example of this is sound. Reality is silent, as we understand the term. The collision of objects causes waves to ripple through the air, but this is not the same as ‘sound’ as we subjectively experience it. The qualities of birdsong, guitar chords or laughter that so delight us are created by our minds, based on air ripples detected by our ears, and they exist only there. Another example is colour, which also does not exist in external reality. Different wavelengths of light are reflected off different surfaces, and these different wavelengths are registered by our eyes, which send this information to our brains. This is not the same, however, as a colour such as red objectively existing in the external world. Before there was life on earth that had evolved eyes to look, there was no sense in which the sky was blue or that grass was green. This only happened after living things invented green and blue in their minds.
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We state this now with some confidence thanks to the work of generations of scientists, but students of Zen Buddhism came to the same realisation through detailed study of their own minds. Zen students were asked, ‘Who is the master who makes the grass green?’ and left to observe their own minds until they were able to answer this question and understand that, in the words of the American neurobiologist Dean Buonomano, ‘The brain is an illusion factory.’ Or, in the words of Nietzsche, ‘we are much more the artist than we realise’.
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The idea that we live in a mental model of reality, rather than reality itself, is fundamental to the philosophy of William Blake. As he explained in Jerusalem, ‘In your Bosom you bear your Heaven and Earth & all you behold; tho’ it appears Without, it is Within, in your imagination.’ Like many of Blake’s statements, this can seem bewildering and mystical at first glance, but when we reread it we see that Blake was being clear and concise: although the world appears to be outside of you, what you experience as the world is created in your mind.
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When we recognise this, we see that our ideas are just that – ideas. Once we accept this, we stop confusing ideas with reality and we find ourselves in ‘a place where Contrarieties are equally True’. Both ‘the world is flat’ and ‘the world is round’ are true in the sense that they are real ideas. There is no conflict regarding validity here, because one is not more of an idea than the other. In Blake’s words, ‘Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.’ Here, then, is an aspect of Beulah, the peace that descends when we realise the extent to which the hectic world outside is a world inside, which we ourselves have created in our own image.
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Imagine that your mind was wiped clean, so that it was as blank and fresh as that of a newborn baby. Then imagine you are on the top of a hill in an unexplored wilderness. Your brain has no immediate access to this world because it is locked away inside the dark, silent cavern of your skull. The only way it can make sense of your environment is by interpreting the messages being received by your senses.
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You slowly turn around through 360 degrees, and your eyes receive information about the world you find yourself in, which they forward to your brain. As you turn, you see as far as the horizon in all directions. A circular model of the outside world has been created inside your head, with you at the centre. As far as you know, the horizon is the limit of this creation, the literal ends of the earth. If you watched the world change and evolve over time, you would start to develop beliefs about cause and effect and how things work. The mental model you are creating is the basis of your rational understanding of the world.
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Blake describes this situation in Milton. In his reference to the ‘Sons of Los’, Blake is referring to the work of the imagination. The space that we perceive, he believes, becomes a model of our world built in the mind: The Sky is an immortal Tent built by the Sons of Los. And every Space that a Man views around his dwelling-place: Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount. Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his Universe;
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Because you are constructing that ‘Universe’ yourself in your mind, you are effectively its creator. This explains the strange quote of Blake’s mentioned earlier, when he said that all spaces larger than a globule of blood exist as creations in our mind. The aspect of our mind that falls for this internal world and believes it to be real is Urizen, who believed that the construction of this mental model of a small part of the universe made him a creator god. Urizen’s delusion was caused by his limited awareness: being blind to what was beyond himself, he couldn’t imagine anything greater than he was.
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Urizen is not the typical personification of reason that you might expect to find in the Age of Enlightenment. Reason was then being lauded as a golden key with which to escape from the prison of faith, but Blake emphasised how small and limited it was and how deluded we become when we fail to recognise this. Urizen, as we’ve noted, is a personification of the default mode network in the brain. It is this which constructs the world in which we live, the story of our self or ego, and our rational beliefs and expectations about the world. This is a small, approximate model of the world, for reasons of mental efficiency, but it does at least try to be useful. It is flawed, but its intentions are not necessarily evil or cruel. Problems arise not through intent, but because it is unaware of the world beyond its limitations. Like our minds, Urizen has no knowledge of what he doesn’t know and deep down this terrifies him, because it threatens his very sense of identity. He will attempt to belittle, mock, or otherwise deny evidence that there is more than he knows, and that he is not the powerful creator he thinks he is. Deeply insecure, Urizen is the aspect of our minds that needs not just to be right, but to be thought of as right. You will recognise him immediately if you use social media.
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As much as we like to think we live in the real world, our brains inside our skulls are isolated from that world and instead create a simulacrum of this exterior based on information from the senses. This simulation is seductively convincing, as we’ve noted, and we remain blind to the ways it differs from external reality. Aspects of the world that our senses are not capable of perceiving, such as infrared light, microwave radiation or the magnetic field that some migratory birds use for navigation, are absent in our mental models. Some qualities that we do perceive, such as colour, sound and pain, seem entirely real to us even though what we are experiencing is a wild abstraction of the information our nerve impulses report. Our eyes detect which wavelengths of light bounce off objects and the mind uses this information to create the illusion that we are looking at a verdant green, cherry red or International Klein Blue. A collision of objects creates shockwaves in the air, but that is not the same as the experience of hearing a cymbal crash or a mournful clarinet. Pain can be so overwhelming that the idea it isn’t a quality of the physical world seems like a tasteless joke, but the electrical impulses carried through our nervous system are simply electrical impulses. They are not the experience of agony.
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Newton’s ‘single vision’ sees only the materialistic aspect of the world, devoid of any mental qualities. From this perspective, it is logical to argue that colour, sound and pain are not physical qualities of the universe. Yet for anyone interested in what it is like to be human, those experiences need to be treated as real. Things that are ‘only in our minds’ are important, and that is true of ideas, regardless of the extent to which they correlate with objective reality. Blake recognised that what we think of as the external world is a product of the mind and, as we’ve already seen, he was aware that his visions were also the product of his imagination. It seemed logical, therefore, to treat both with equal validity. It also seems likely that his experience of visions helped him understand the extent to which the exterior world is actually interior.
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The implications of the mind-created nature of the visionary world are profound, but Blake saw them clearly. He stated boldly in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘men forgot that All Deities reside in the Human breast’. Gods, demons and angels were all ideas, he is saying, created in the white-hot forge of the human imagination. The jealous, controlling creator God of the Old Testament, he believed, was none other than Urizen, a part of our minds projected out into the exterior world.
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Blake was not the first to view God as the creation of the human mind, but there were not many who stated this as clearly as he did. Much can be implied from Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel, for example, in which God is depicted emerging from or lying upon a strange pink cloud which is an exact, anatomically correct cross section of a human brain. Michelangelo may have been prepared to hint at this idea, but he was wise enough not to state it outright. Established religions viewed the idea that we made the gods, and not vice versa, as blasphemy. Blake was much more comfortable with the idea, but then he did not see it as a reason to think any less of divine entities.
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Ideas like this coloured Blake’s view of the God of the Old Testament, with whom he had a complicated relationship. As has often been noted, the Old Testament deity was a difficult, contradictory character. The classical historian Tom Holland describes him as: ‘Wise, he was also wilful; all-powerful, he was also readily hurt; consistent, he was also alarmingly unpredictable […] the God of Israel was hailed in the Jewish holy books as all these things, and more.’ To Blake, this showed all the hallmarks of a God born in the minds of man. He called this God ‘Nobodaddy’, a rather contemporary sounding neologism, whom he frequently criticised in the pages of his notebook: Then old Nobodaddy aloft. Farted & belchd & coughd. And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering. Every bit as well as war & slaughtering. These criticisms were extended to religions that falsely worshipped this mankind-created God, and even at times to the religious texts that supported these religious interpretations. “The Hebrew Nation did not write it. Avarice and Chastity did shite it.”
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Satirical lines such as these should be interpreted as an attack on how the Bible was used and interpreted, rather than an attack on the book itself. Blake considered the Bible to be the product of what he called ‘Poetic Genius’, and therefore divinely inspired. To Blake, the book itself was more precious and heavenly than the deluded creator God it glorified. He saw poetic inspiration like this as evidence of a greater power, beyond the delusion of Nobodaddy, which could only be glimpsed by looking outside the limits of Urizen. It was probably this ultimate God to whom he addressed the following lines. They show an understanding of our limited perspective, but also sympathy for those trapped inside it: To God If you have formed a Circle to go into, Go into it yourself & see how you would do.
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Blake’s almost Taoist recognition of the importance of opposites, along with his understanding of the mental nature of the world we experience, had profound consequences. As we can see, they have already taken him far beyond ideas that were acceptable in contemporary theology. His position was so deeply heretical that, without deep study of his work, it could sometimes be difficult to recognise just how extreme it was. The importance of angels in his writings, for example, could distract readers from his belief that the God worshipped by religion was a product of the human mind.
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Blake’s worldview did not only affect his views on religion and spiritual matters. The dividing line between the external and internal was extremely vague in his mind, as we have seen, and as a result, events in the external world were often seen as being interchangeable with internal states. This had a profoundly human impact on his political ideas.
Notes
Amount: 4
- Urizen
- If a single set of views were to dominate society, the world would be static and dull
- Nothing can be fully understood without its opposite
- We generally struggle with the idea that two contradictory positions can be true
- The brain’s perceptual systems actively and pre-consciously interpret and edit their input