“Did Jesus teach doubt? or did he
Give any lessons of philosophy?
Charge visionaries with deceiving?
Or call men wise for not believing?”
Unhappily the respective answers from Verulam and Cirey have not been registered by a too contemptuous prophet; they would have been worth reading.
The dogma of “Christian humility” is totally indigestible to Blake; he batters upon it with the heaviest artillery of his “gospel.”
“Was Jesus humble? or did he
Give any proofs of humility?
Boast of high things with humble tone,
And give with charity a stone?”
Again;
“When the rich learned Pharisee
Came to consult him secretly,
Upon his heart with iron pen
He wrote ‘Ye must be born again.’
He was too proud to take a bribe:
He spoke with authority, not like a Scribe.”
Nor can the love of enemies be accepted literally as an endurable doctrine; for “he who loves his enemies hates his friends,” in the mind of the too ardent and candid poet, who proceeds to insist that the divine teacher “must mean the mere love of civility” (amour de convenance); “and so he must mean concerning humility”: for the willing acceptance of death cannot humiliate, and is therefore no test of “humility”[40] in Blake’s sense; self-sacrifice in effect implies an “honest triumphant pride.” (Here of course the writer drops for a moment the religious view and divine meaning of the Passion, and looks towards Calvary from the simply human side as it appeared to casual bystanders; for here he has only to deal with what he conceives to be errors in the human conception of Christ’s human character. “You the orthodox, and you the reasoners, assert through the mouths of your churches or philosophies that purely human virtues are actually predicable of Christ, and appeal for evidence to his life and death. Well and good; we will, to gain ground for argument with you, forget that the Passion is not, and admit that it is, what you would call a purely human transaction. Are then these virtues predicable of it even as such?”) A good man who incurs risk of death by his goodness, is too “proud” to abjure that goodness and live; here is none of that you call “humility.” Such a man need not have died; “Caiaphas would forgive” if one “died with Christian ease asking pardon” after your “humble” fashion:—
“He had only to say that God was the devil
And the devil was God, like a Christian civil;
Mild Christian regrets to the devil confess
For affronting him thrice in the wilderness;”
and such an one might have become a very Cæsar’s minion, or Cæsar himself. Though of course mainly made up of violent quibbling and perversities of passionate humour, which falls to work in this vehement way upon words as some personal relief (a relief easily conceivable in Blake’s case by any student of his life), all this has also its value in helping us to measure according to what light we may have in us the stronger and weaker, the worse and better, the graver and lighter sides of the man. It belongs evidently to the period when he painted portraits of the dead and transcribed Jerusalem from spiritual dictation. “This,” he lets us know by way of prelude or opening note, “is what Joseph of Arimathæa said to my Fairy,” or natural spiritual part by which he conversed with spirits. Next in his defiant doggrel he calls on “Pliny and Trajan”—heathen learning and heathen power or goodness—to “come before Joseph of Arimathæa” and “listen patient.” “What, are you here?” he asks as if in the direct surprise of vision. (I will not give these roughest notes in the perfection of their pure doggrel. As verse, serious or humorous, they are irreclaimable and intolerable; what empirical value they may have must be wrung out of them with all haste.)
We may now as well look into a later division of the poem, where Christ is tempted of Satan to obey.