“Was Jesus chaste? or did he
Give any lessons of chastity?
The morning blushed fiery red;
Mary was found in adulterous bed.
Earth groaned beneath, and heaven above
Trembled at discovery of love.
Jesus was sitting in Moses’ chair;
They brought the trembling woman there.
Moses commands she be stoned to death:
What was the sound of Jesus’ breath?
He laid his hand on Moses’ law;
The ancient heavens, in silent awe,
Writ with curses from pole to pole,
All away began to roll;
The earth trembling and naked lay
In secret bed of mortal clay—
On Sinai felt the hand Divine
Pulling[34] back the bloody shrine—
And she heard the breath of God
As she heard by Eden’s flood:
‘Good and Evil are no more;
Sinai’s trumpets, cease to roar;
Cease, finger of God, to write
The heavens are not clean in thy sight.
Thou art good, and thou alone;
Nor may the sinner cast one stone.
To be good only, is to be
A God, or else a Pharisee.
Thou Angel of the Presence Divine,
That didst create this body of mine,
Wherefore hast thou writ these laws
And created hell’s dark jaws?
My Presence I will take from thee;
A cold leper thou shalt be.
Though thou wast so pure and bright
That heaven was impure in thy sight,
Though thine oath turned heaven pale,
Though thy covenant built hell’s gaol,
Though thou didst all to chaos roll
With the serpent for its soul,
Still the breath Divine does move—
And the breath Divine is love.
Mary, fear not. Let me see
The seven devils that torment thee.
Hide not from my sight thy sin,
That forgiveness thou mayst win.
Hath no man condemnèd thee?’
‘No man, Lord.’ ‘Then what is he
Who shall accuse thee? Come ye forth,
Fallen fiends of heavenly birth
That have forgot your ancient love
And driven away my trembling dove;
You shall bow before her feet;
You shall lick the dust for meat;
And though you cannot love, but hate,
Shall be beggars at love’s gate.
—What was thy love? Let me see’t;
Was it love or dark deceit?’
‘Love too long from me has fled;
’Twas dark deceit, to earn my bread;
’Twas covet, or ’twas custom, or
Some trifle not worth caring for:
That they may call a shame and sin
Love’s temple that God dwelleth in,
And hide in secret hidden shrine
The naked human form divine,
And render that a lawless thing
On which the soul expands her wing.
But this, O Lord, this was my sin—
When first I let these devils in,
In dark pretence to chastity
Blaspheming love, blaspheming thee.
Thence rose secret adulteries,
And thence did covet also rise.
My sin thou hast forgiven me;
Canst thou forgive my blasphemy?
Canst thou return to this dark hell
And in my burning bosom dwell?
And canst thou die that I may live?
And canst thou pity and forgive?’”
In no second poem shall we find such a sustained passage as that; such light of thought and thunder of verse; such sudden splendour of fire seen across a strange land and among waste places beyond the receded landmarks of the day or above the glimmering lintels of the night. The passionate glory of its rapid and profound music fills the sense with too deep and sharp a delight to leave breathing-space for any thought of analytic or apologetic work. But the spirit of the verse is not less great than the body of it is beautiful. “Divide from the divine glory the softness and warmth of human colour—subtract from the divine the human presence—subdue all refraction to the white absolute light—and that light is no longer as the sun’s is, warm with sweet heat of life and liberal of good gifts; but foul with overmuch purity, sick with disease of excellence, unclean through exceeding cleanness, like the skin of a leper ‘as white as snow.’” For the divine nature is not greater than the human; (they are one from eternity, sundered by the separative creation or fall, severed into type and antitype by bodily generation, but to be made one again when life and death shall both have died;) not greater than the human nature, but greater than the qualities which the human nature assumes upon earth. God is man, and man God; as neither of himself the greater, so neither of himself the less: but as God is the unfallen part of man, man the fallen part of God, God must needs be (not more than man, but assuredly) more than the qualities of man. Thus the mystic can consistently deny that man’s moral goodness or badness can be predicable of God, while at the same time he affirms man’s intrinsic divinity and God’s intrinsic humanity. Man can only possess abstract qualities—“allegoric virtues”—by reason of that side of his nature which he has not in common with God: God, not partaking of the “generative nature,” cannot partake of qualities which exist only by right of that nature. The other “God”[35] or “Angel of the Presence” who created the sexual and separate body of man did but cleave in twain the “divine humanity,” which becoming reunited shall redeem man without price and without covenant and without law; he meantime, the Creator,[36] is a divine dæmon, liable to error, subduable by and through this very created nature of his invention, which he for the present imprisons and torments. His law is the law of Moses, which according to the Manichean heresy Christ came to reverse as diabolic. This singular (and presumably “Pantheistic”) creed of Blake’s has a sort of Asiatic flavour about it, but seems harder and more personal in its mythology than an eastern philosopher’s; has also a distinct western type and Christian touch in it; being wrought as it were of Persian lotus-leaves hardened into the consistency of English oak-timber. The most wonderful part of his belief or theory is this: “That after Christ’s death he became Jehovah:”[37] which may mean simply that through Christ the law of liberty came to supplant the bondage of law, so that where Jehovah was Christ is; or may typify the change of evangel into law, of full-grown Christianity into a fresh type of “Judaism,” of the Gospel or good news of freedom into the Church or dogmatic body of faith; or may imply that the two forces, after that supreme sacrifice, coalesced and became one, all absolute Deity, being absorbed into the Divine Humanity; or, as a practical public would suggest, may mean or typify nothing. It is certain that Blake appears so far to have accepted the “Catholic tradition” as to regard this death or sacrifice as tending somehow not merely to the redemption of man (which would be no more than the sequel or outcome of his mystic faith in the salvation of man by man, the deliverance or redemption of the accident through the essence), but also to the union of the divine crucified man with the creative governing power. Somehow; but the prophet must explain for himself the exact means. We are now fairly up to the ears in mysticism, and cannot afford to strike out at random, for fear of being carried right off our feet by the ground-swell and drifted into waters where swimming will be yet tougher work.
The belief in “holy insurrection” must be almost as old as the oldest religions or philosophies afloat or articulate. In the most various creeds this feature of faith stands out sharply with a sort of tangible human appeal. Earlier heretics than the author of Jerusalem have taken this to be the radical significance of Christianity; a divine revolt against divine law; an evidence that man must become as God only by resistance to God—“the God of this world;” that if Prometheus cannot, Zeus will not deliver us: and that man, if saved at all, must indeed be saved “so as by fire”—by ardour of rebellion and strenuous battle against the God of nature: who as of old must yet feed upon his children, and will no longer take stone for flesh though never so well wrapped up; who must have the organ of destruction and division, by which alone he lives[38] and has ability to beget, cut off from him with the sharpest edge of flint that rebellious hands can whet. In these galliambics of Blake’s we see the flint of Atys whetted for such work; made ready against the priests of Nature and her God, though by an alien hand that will cast no incense upon the altar of Cybele; no Phrygian’s, who would spend his own blood to moisten and brighten the high places of her worship: but one ready, with what fire he can get, to burn down the groves and melt down the cymbals of Dindymus.
Returning now to the residue of the immediate matter in hand, we may duly notice in this excursive and all but shapeless poem many of Blake’s strong points put forth with all his strength: curiously crossed and intermixed with rough skirmishing attacks on the opposite faction, clerical or sceptical, by way of interlude. “You would have Christ act according to what you call a rational or a philanthropic habit of mind—set the actual God to reason, to elevate, to convince or convert after the fashion in which you would set about it? redeem, not the spiritual man by inspiration of his spirit, but the bodily man by application of his arguments? make him as ‘Bacon and Newton’” (Blake’s usual types of the mere understanding)?
“For thus the Gospel St. Isaac confutes:
‘God can only be known by his attributes;
And as to the indwelling of the Holy Ghost
Or of Christ and the Father, it’s all a boast
And pride and vanity of imagination
That did wrong to follow this world’s fashion.’
To teach doubt and experiment
Certainly was not what Christ meant.”
Certainly also no doggrel can be rougher, looser, heavier-weighted about the wrists and ankles, than this; which indeed it was perhaps hardly fair to transcribe; for take out the one great excerpt already given, and the whole poem is a mass of huddled notes jotted down in a series of hints, on stray sides and corners of leaves, crammed into holes and byways out of sight or reach. So perfect a poet is not to be judged by the scrawls and sketches of his note-book; but as we cannot have his revision of the present piece of work, and are not here to make any revision of our own, we must either let drop the chance of insight thus afforded, or make shift with the rough and ragged remnants allowed us by the sparing fingers of a close-handed fate. And this chance of insight is not to be lightly let go, if we mean to look at all into Blake’s creed and mind. “Experiment” to the mystic seems not insufficient merely, but irrational. “Reason says miracle; Newton says doubt;” as Blake in another place expounds to such disciples as he may get. On this point also his “Vision of Christ” is other than the Christian public’s.
“Thine is the friend of all mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.”
His Christ cared no more to convince “the blind” by plain speech than to save “the world”—the form or flesh of the world, not that imperishable body or complement of the soul which if a man “keep under and bring into subjection” he transgresses against himself; but the mere “sexual” shell which only exists (as we said) by error and by division and by right of temporal appearance.
Keeping in mind the utter roughness and formal incompletion of these notes—which in effect are the mere broken shell or bruised husk of a poem yet unfledged and unembodied—we may put to some present use the ensuing crude and loose fragments.
“What was he doing all that time
From twelve years old to manly prime?
Was he then idle, or the less
About his Father’s business?
If he had been Antichrist aping[39] Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us;
Gone sneaking into synagogues
And not used the elders and priests like dogs;
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obeyed himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself.
That is the trick of the ancient Elf.
This is the race that Jesus ran:
Humble to God, haughty to man;
Cursing the rulers before the people
Even to the temple’s highest steeple;
And when he humbled himself to God,
Then descended the cruel rod.”