William Blake vs The World Chapter 6. CONVERSED NOT WITH DEVILS
Author: John Higgs Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2021 Review Date: Status:📚
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As a source of authority, Blake looked to his own experience and nothing more. If anything differed from this, it was by definition wrong. Seeing as pretty much every philosophy and system differed from his experience, he had no choice but to reject them all. As he would write in Jerusalem: I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans. I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create
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In 1790, Blake began work on an illustrated book that serves as a critique of Swedenborg. In attempting to explain where Swedenborg was wrong, Blake produced an account of his own theology that was short, profound, funny and shockingly outrageous. Its title alone defines his main difference of opinion with the Swedish mystic. Swedenborg’s best-known and most readable book was titled Heaven and Hell. In reaction, Blake gave his work the theologically extraordinary title of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
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For Swedenborg, heaven and hell were different and separate things. A soul after death would know one but could never know the other. Blake, in contrast, joined the two in holy wedlock because, as he scribbled in the margins of one of Swedenborg’s books, ‘Heaven & Hell are born together.’ His love of contraries and the dynamic tensions between them were found to be sorely lacking in Swedenborg. As he saw it, the concept of heaven without hell, or hell without heaven, was meaningless.
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Blake found absurd the idea that a human soul could know one but not the other, because heaven and hell were both internal states. An individual would no doubt favour one over time, but both were always available. A kind, compassionate individual always had the opportunity to dive gleefully into the selfish world of isolated individualism, just as a cruel-hearted narcissist could awaken at any moment to the peace and light of selfless unity.
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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell begins with the bombastic, heavy metal line ‘Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air’. Here Rintrah is the personification of just wrath. Blake, clearly, is not messing around. The poem that follows is a warning about false gurus, which is easy to read as an attack on Swedenborg’s supporters. It details a just man being led away from the correct path into barren climes, while the trickster who laid the false path feigns innocence:
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility.
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.
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After the warning of this tone-setting prelude, Blake wastes no more time and gets down to business. The next page begins with a couple of sentences which, for most modern readers, will need unpicking:
As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up.
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To help us out Blake wrote ‘1790’, the date he composed that first line, above it in the copy of the book owned by his patron Thomas Butts. Thirty-three years before 1790 was 1757. According to Swedenborg, the Last Judgment – that much debated staple of Judaic, Christian and Islamic thought – had already happened, and took place in the year 1757. Most people didn’t notice because it occurred exclusively in heaven, he claimed, although the spiritual transformation it generated would, in time, affect all of humanity.
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The year 1757 was, therefore, when a new form of consciousness appeared on earth and, it just so happened, it was also the year that William Blake was born. You can imagine how this scenario pleased him. While he was quick to dismiss Swedenborg in areas that he disagreed with, he had no problem with his ideas when they appealed. In these lines, he declares this new era to be hellish and specifically identifies Swedenborg as the angel who announces it. For Blake, of course, ‘hellish’ is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when he wanted to balance Swedenborg’s pro-heaven prejudice. Swedenborg’s writings are described as ‘linen clothes folded up’, suggesting dry, dusty, corpse-like ancient texts, and not the vibrant living words that we now needed. You won’t find any exclamations like ‘Rintrah roars!’ in Swedenborg.
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Blake does not hide or sugar-coat his issues with Swedenborg: Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods. And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.
Note: i think this is similar to the enlightement. It sought to free people from blind faith but offered an alternative which made the same mistake that religion did, which was to provide certainty. Enlightenment science and the religion they saught to escapoe are the same in that regard. They have the same underlying psychological mechanisms. A desire for certainty. They’re not as different as they make themselves out to be. The difference is only on the surface
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Unlike most of Swedenborg’s critics, Blake was not questioning the reality of Swedenborg’s visions. Instead, he argued that his accounts of them were flawed and of little value. They suffered from the limitations inherent in the worldview of successful, privileged authority figures. Swedenborg was too comfortable in his own reality tunnel to question how limited it was. We all have our blind spots, of course, but not everyone wants to discover them.
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To show what Swedenborg was missing, Blake dedicated much of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to exploring infernal wisdom and knowledge. He includes a lengthy section called ‘Proverbs of Hell’, which lists the sayings he heard when he was ‘walking among the fires of hell, delighted with enjoyments of Genius; which to angels look like torment and insanity’. The hellish proverbs include some of his most quoted lines:
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These proverbs were intended to be universal truths. They may contain wisdom that you won’t hear from the mouths of angels, but that doesn’t stop them from being true.
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Blake included accounts of meetings with angels, but the stories were chosen to display the limits and failings of angelic understanding. As he confessed, ‘I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.’ To modern eyes, there is something very funny about a sentence as otherworldly and profound as this starting with the mundane phrase ‘I have always found …’ It is tempting to suspect that he was mocking Swedenborg, who displays a very similar attitude in his written accounts of heaven and hell. It seems more likely, though, that the similarity of prose stems from similar experience. As we know, to both Blake and Swedenborg, visions were everyday experiences. Even conversations with angels can become commonplace.
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Having expressed the failings of Swedenborg’s limited understanding, Blake has no choice but to set out how things are, at least as he sees them. It is this which makes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell so important, raising it above a literary spat. Blake does not argue for his personal perspective; he simply states it as fact. It is from this work that we get some of the clearest statements of his philosophy, many of which we have already talked about or will discuss soon: Without Contraries is no progression. Energy is Eternal Delight. Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. Opposition is true Friendship. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. God only Acts &Is, in existing beings or Men. For every thing that lives is Holy. Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul.
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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell repeatedly highlights the importance Blake places on contraries. For example, at one point he divides humanity into two types of people: the Prolific, who produce and create, and the Devourers, who consume. Other writers might praise the Prolific and condemn the Devourers, but Blake understands that both types are needed to keep the world turning: ‘These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.’ Not one to miss a sharp kick at religion, he adds, ‘Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.’
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For all that Blake argues that both these opposites are needed, he doesn’t do so in a way that those of us raised in the postmodern twentieth century might expect. He is not saying that both are in some way equal, neither is he taking a relativistic approach about their virtues. When he stresses the wisdom of hell, he is not saying that there is no difference between heaven and hell. Nor is he arguing that they are both as bad as each other. He writes very clearly that: ‘Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.’
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For Blake, stressing the need for contraries in no way disturbed his moral compass. If anything, recognising that things do not make sense without their opposites – whether that is heaven and hell, love and hate, spirit and matter or the Prolific and the Devourers – automatically highlights which way this moral compass should face. Should you focus on heaven and ignore hell, you mistakenly believe that heaven is everything. If you understand both, in contrast, you truly grasp why it is you choose to face heaven. Blake never forgot that it was the dynamic struggle between the two that matters, for this is the power that turns the engines of the universe. This is what keeps creation alive, vibrant and constantly dancing. This is why anyone who ‘tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence’.
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Swedenborg could only agree with heaven. Hellish thought was invisible to him. Blake grasped both, rejected neither and, by marrying heaven and hell, truly understood good and evil.