William Blake, the Man

by Charles Gardner

Blake perceived in Lavater the innocence of a child, and loved him accordingly; but he had already surpassed him, and thus was able to criticize him with true discernment. He said that Lavater made “everything originate in its accident.” But a man’s sins are accidents and not a part of his real nature. They are a denial of his real man, and therefore are negative. Hence he says: “Vice is a great negation. Every man’s leading propensity ought to be called his leading Virtue and his good Angel.” This last sentence contains Nietzsche. Every positive act is virtue. Murder, theft, backbiting, undermining, circumventing, are vicious because they are not positive acts, but prevent them in the perpetrator and the victim. He put his finger on Lavater’s other mistake, which was also shared by his contemporaries. “They suppose that Woman’s Love is Sin. In consequence, all the loves and graces, with them, are sins.” Blake not only here outstrips his contemporaries, but at a leap reaches what are the conclusions of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth, men and women racked their brains over the irreconcilable dualism of art and religion, and they chose one or the other, with baneful results. Blake reconciled the two when he saw that the new man in us, unveiled by regeneration, worked by direct vision (religion), and that the new man’s prime quality was imagination (art). Once he grasped this, the problem ceased for him.

Here we get at the reason why Lavater has ever failed to keep his lovers. Moses Mendelssohn, disciplined in the severe scholastic methods of Maimonides, easily vanquished him in religious controversy; but men who were less directly concerned with his religion, like Goethe, began by exaggerating his qualities and ended by quietly dropping him. It is clear to us that Lavater could keep our allegiance only if he had taken a big step forward in the same direction as Blake. This was impossible, and so we find ourselves obliged to follow Goethe’s example.

Swedenborg’s influence was the greatest and most lasting on Blake’s mind.

It is not clear when Blake first took to reading Swedenborg. There is no trace of his influence until The Songs of Innocence and Experience. Some of Swedenborg’s early scientific works had been translated into English. But of his theological works only one volume out of twelve of the Arcana Celestia was published in English; and, for the rest, those who could not read Latin had to be content with samples. Since Swedenborg bulked so largely in Blake’s life, it is necessary to give here some details of his mental and spiritual development.

Swedenborg’s father was a Lutheran Bishop. Thus the son, in his most impressionable years, was thrown among Lutherans, who maintained a strenuous protest against the errors of the papacy, and fed or starved their souls with dreary doctrines of justification by faith only, imputed righteousness, and other forensic privileges that came to them through the substitutionary death and merits of Christ. In all these dogmas the young Swedenborg was well drilled. But his first bent was in quite another direction. While still a boy he manifested a scientific mind of immense energy and curiosity that peered searchingly into all the sciences of his time, and won for himself a wonderful knowledge of anatomy, astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, mineralogy, and led him to make interesting experiments in invention, such as water-clocks and flying machines. He wrote many books on these subjects, the best known of which in England is The Animal Kingdom. Here his interest is greatly stirred by things physical and psychological, and he is fired with the ambition to unite the two. Not, however, till he was fifty-four did his first interest pass over to the things of the soul. When this transition took place, he peered with the same intense scrutiny into supersensual things, and brought to bear on them a mind formed and informed by science and scientific methods.

He took up the Lutheran tenets precisely where he had left them, but, no longer a child, he was forced to criticize what he had once felt, and he set himself to rationalize Lutheran theology and such elements of catholic theology as had survived through Luther. In this he was not always so successful as he imagined. His doctrine of the Trinity, that Jesus Christ is the One God and that the Trinity is in Him, gets over an arithmetical difficulty, but finally leaves the imagination baffled, trying to make out how Jesus carried on the government of the universe while He lay a helpless infant in the manger or His mother’s arms. His reaction against all outside views of Christ’s death, imputed righteousness, and faith only, was more successful, but not new, since in this the quakers in England and Jacob Boehme were before him. Nor was his contention that love was the supreme good new to those who had read through the New Testament. His doctrine of uses was merely a theological variation of that utilitarianism which is inseparable from rationalism, and which casts over everything a drab veil that only the artist can remove. He is really at his best when he expatiates on love and wisdom. Love corresponds with the heart, wisdom with the lungs. As the heart sends the blood to the lungs, where it is purified by the oxygen, so love feeds the understanding, and is in turn purified by it. Swedenborg’s perception of wisdom begotten of love inspired his best passages and gave them their authentic import.

Swedenborg gazed inwards so intently that after an initial period of unrest, terrors, and nightmares his inner eye opened, and he saw into the realities of the inner world. For the moment I take his word for it, and will question later on. His open eye saw into heaven and hell, gazed into the faces of angels and of God, and his opened ear heard the angels speaking things he could understand and utter. At once he rationalized. He stripped even the celestial angels of all mystery as well as of garments, and traced them back to an earthly pedigree. Angels are men, and when they talk they are no more interesting than the elders of a Lutheran congregation. God also is a man—not, be it observed, the Man of a crude anthropomorphism, but infinite, omnipotent Man, from Whom each man, created in His image (will) and likeness (understanding), draws his real manhood. He carried this doctrine into his rationalized version of the Incarnation. Christ assumed human nature in the womb of the Virgin, and by His conquering life put it off, replacing it by the Divine Humanity. The last phrase has accomplished yeasty work in modern religious thought. How many are aware of its origin?

Swedenborg throws out many suggestive remarks about hell. Certainly it was high time that it was looked into, for the protestant hell was as horrible and revolting as the catholic. He began by lifting himself out of space and time. He was soon brought by necessity to perceive that when these no longer exist, then all appearances depend upon a man’s state, and therefore state governs the perceptions whether of the angels in heaven or the devils in hell. Hell, like heaven, is peopled entirely from earth. No one goes there but by his own choice, and he chooses because he finds there exactly what is congenial to his own condition. Swedenborg eliminated anything arbitrary in man’s destiny. Fitness decides by an inexorable law that God could evade only by ceasing to be God. Swedenborg’s hell is a filthy and insanitary place, but the filthy inhabitants are no more disturbed by that than rats in a sewer. He further declared that heaven and hell were born together, and that they are contraries necessary to each other’s existence. Blake underlined and commented on this in his copy of the Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love. How the suggestion worked in him we shall see later on.

Swedenborg’s hell is filthy and his heaven dull. There are further surprises when we through his mediumship glimpse their inhabitants. The angels, of course, are all sound Swedenborgians, and are attractive or repellent according to Swedenborg’s attraction or repulsion for us. But the devils, not being Swedenborgians, can command an audience of the majority of Christians who agree with them in their non-allegiance. What Blake discovered in them was a wonderful energy and exuberance which made them not only more attractive than the angels, but also, except for the stenches, might almost have transformed their hell into heaven.

By this time Swedenborg had explored many kingdoms—mineral, vegetable, animal, human, divine, hellish; and his knowledge of the kingdoms informed him of universal correspondences, the law of which came to him thus freshly from his own observation. It was probably this which made him assert so often that he was announcing something new, for with his culture he must have known that Paracelsus had perceived the same law like hundreds before him, and that Boehme wrote a treatise on the Signatures of all things.