William Blake, the Man

by Charles Gardner

That Blake found a home in an ancient and consummated Church is true only if Swedenborg’s New Church is really the New Jerusalem predicted by St John! For the rest, we hail with joy the element of “hell” in Blake.

Blake himself makes some short incisive remarks on Swedenborg, which will carry us a little farther to an understanding. “Swedenborg has not written one new truth.” “He has written all the old falsehoods.” Blake had ardently welcomed Swedenborg as a new teacher with a new message. In these sentences he betrays disappointment, anger, and resentment. “Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number.” If Blake had had a wider culture, he would have known this when a boy, and blown off his fumes at the proper season. We shall encounter again and again his lack of grace when dealing with his successful contemporaries.

We see, so far, that Blake reckoned that Swedenborg had failed him, and that anything of value he found in him, he could find in the old masters. But there was something he could find in them—a spirit of beauty and a beauty of form—that was wholly lacking in Swedenborg, and an energy and exuberance that appeared only in Swedenborg’s hell. That this should be the net result of Blake’s expectations and Swedenborg’s pretensions was too much for Blake’s patience; hence the violence of his reaction.

Blake must have felt vaguely all along the lack of the æsthetic faculty in Swedenborg. It was Swedenborg who helped him finally to understand the exact value of his visions and thus to place him.

We have seen that Swedenborg, by abstraction from space and time, arrived at a doctrine of state which takes their place in heaven and hell. From this it follows that man’s vision is wholly dependent on his state, and also that a man’s visions cannot be trusted unless he has a perfect organ of vision resting on a sound state. It is always fatuous for a religious teacher to appeal to his visions to enforce his doctrines, since they depend on the man himself, and we must form our judgment of him apart from his visions. To appeal to a vision for the truth of a doctrine, and to the doctrine for the truth of a vision, is merely to whirl oneself round in a vicious circle; and therefore Swedenborg’s whole make-up—will and understanding—must be laid bare and measured by some standard with which we may try the spirits and the prophets before we can begin to approach his visions and gauge their value.

Swedenborg’s state was a state of reason, whether he viewed this world or the other. His early scientific studies, unbalanced by any real appreciation of art, moulded his mind into a rigid state which was impervious to any outside stimulus. When he turned to religion, he made the barren attempt to trim the mysteries of the Faith until they came wholly within the grasp of the understanding. This is a rationalizing process. Swedenborgians may object to hear their master called a rationalist. It is true that that term is usually applied to those who have no supersensual vision, and even deny its existence. Swedenborg is, of course, sharply distinguished from all such, but he has with them the same fundamental trust of reason, which in their case is used to gauge the things of this world, in his the things of the other. Hence when he has raised our expectations to a dizzy height, as he is about to report on things seen and heard in heaven and hell, there is a ludicrous anticlimax when we find that the angels are simply religious and talk theology everlastingly, that heaven is like a well arranged Dutch tulip field, and excepting one or two phases of hell the whole is just as exciting as a problem in Euclid and as dull as a sanitary report. Hell alone stirred some interest because its inmates had energy and blood. And therefore one sympathizes with those spirits who, allowed to peep into heaven, immediately chose to plunge themselves head-first into hell.

Now Blake, being a visionary, knew that vision depended on will, and he learnt further from Swedenborg that it depended also on state, and so, as a man’s state changed, his vision changed also. Blake’s state was the imagination of the poetic genius (Los), Swedenborg’s the dry logical faculty of the unassisted reason (Urizen), and as Blake looked at Swedenborg’s heaven and hell, he saw them approaching one to the other and finally with an impetuous rush locked in a marital embrace.

This is the most significant vision of modern times, after which it is easy to judge Swedenborg. He had given for life, theology; for beauty, ashes; and instead of emancipating the modern world he condemned it to the appalling tedium of an everlasting Sunday School. The doctrine of the New Jerusalem was not half so beautiful as that of the Old Jerusalem. Christ come again in Glory was stripped of that beauty that men had perceived in His first lowly coming. Blake’s indictment of Swedenborg was severe. It was also an indictment of the whole of protestant theology. The magnificent fruit of Swedenborg’s action and reaction, attraction and repulsion for Blake was The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake was fresh from reading Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, and this and not the ecclesiastical was continually in his thought as he wrote. At the same time it is necessary to remember that Blake was not merely criticizing Swedenborg. Swedenborg gave a rationalized version of the Lutheran doctrine, and therefore to reject him involved a rejection of much of Luther’s teaching and of the protestantism that has flowed from him.

Heaven, then, consists of the passive obeyers of reason, the religious, the good; hell of the active obeyers of Energy, the irreligious, the evil. Here let it be well marked and remembered that by the religious Blake always meant those who repress their energies or passions until they become passive enough for them to obey reason.

Hell’s prime quality is passion or energy or desire. This in itself is neither good nor evil in the abstract sense in which these words are generally understood, but considered absolutely it is good, for it is the native energy of the man made in God’s image and likeness. Energy works according to the object of desire. If a man’s object is the flesh, he becomes an adulterer; if things of beauty and delight, an artist; if God, a saint. Religious people, frightened and mistrustful of their desires, restrain them until they are passive, and in doing so they are destroying the motive power of their lives. They are wholly successful when they become dead souls, and it is then, strictly speaking, that they are fit, not for heaven, but for hell. The stronger the desire, the greater the man. Once direct the energy by fixing its desire on God, it will drive the man to greatness. Thus the typical restrainer or devil is the priest, the typical man of passion or energy is the artist. Those who restrain their energies in the name of Christ have identified Him with the reason, and they have never caught so much as a glimpse of Him as He is. Swedenborg and Milton worshipped a rational Christ, and therefore in Blake’s eyes, as also in the catholic’s, they were heretics. The Book of Job and Shakespeare see inspiration and imagination working with energy as the highest good. The restrainer in the Book of Job is called Satan. Blake alone in his time saw Christ as the supreme symbol of the passionate-imaginative life.