Those who have followed Blake thus far will at once understand the Proverbs of Hell, and perceive in them the glorification of energy and all things belonging to it. Excess, pride, lust and wrath are evidences of great energy. Therefore “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” “the pride of the peacock is the glory of God,” “the lust of the goat is the bounty of God” “the wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.” Generosity, prodigality, open-handedness, impulse, show a rich full nature. Prudence, number, measure, weight, betray poverty and are fit “in a year of death.” The animals of abounding energy are the noblest, like the lion, tiger, eagle. The animals lacking great energy take refuge in cunning, like the fox and the crow. (Blake no longer questions who made the tiger.) Blake extols fountains, not cisterns or standing water, courage not cunning, exuberance not reason-broken passion. Even an energetic “damn” braces, while a pious blessing induces a flabby relaxation.
Man’s most valuable gift of God is passion. What a man makes of his life will depend on how he regards his passion, and into what channels he directs its course.
Thus Blake unites contraries. But just as all is going merry as a marriage bell, he suddenly declares that there are some contraries that can never be married. The modern immanentist world is trying to unite good and evil, beauty and ugliness, with baneful results. We are told that there is nothing ugly to the discerning eye, and one wonders why one should take pains to improve ones crude daubs. Blake says that religious people are always trying to make these false matches. He gives as a typical example the prolific and devourer—the active and passive. Each is necessary to the other’s existence. Union destroys both. It is easy to multiply examples. Black and white produce grey, beautiful in art, but depressing in life. Dark and light, twilight, beautiful, but sad and lowering. Cold and heat, lukewarmness, which is hateful. Hard and soft, slush, which abounds in modern thought. Hate and love, unctuousness or slime, which is particularly obnoxious in some religious people.
Blake hated these mashes. He had no faith in the love that could not hate. Just as he seemed on the brink of sweeping away hell like an amiable modern, he discovered that though he had made quick work of the Swedenborgian and protestant hell, yet hell as Christ thought of it remained and must remain. “Note.—Jesus Christ did not wish to unite, but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats. And He says, ‘I come not to send Peace, but a Sword.’” Thus Blake kept his perception clear and sharp. In following his own mental energy he was able to shake off all pantheistic distortions of good and evil, and to see that though with the majority these are mere abstractions, yet there is ultimately an eternal distinction between them, and therefore heaven and earth may pass away, but Jesus Christ’s word concerning heaven and hell will abide for ever.
Christians have thought of heaven and hell too much as of future places. Blake thought of them primarily as present states. Here a man’s state is obscured by its intermingling with conditions of space and time. Hereafter the state creates the environment. The man in a state of hell, and therefore in hell, is the one whose energy or vital fire is dead. The man in a state of Heaven is the one who lives the more abundant life in which his religion, art, and philosophy have become one. The real hell and the real heaven can never be married, for any attempt to marry them results in moral loss. But a man can pass from a state of hell into a state of heaven, and the way to do it is the old way of repentance and faith—repentance which changes heart and mind by giving them a new object, and faith that takes and receives the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God.
Blake gave a curious illustration of his doctrine of state. A Swedenborgian angel came to him, and condoled with him because of the hot, burning dungeon that he was preparing for himself to all eternity. The angel at his request undertook to show him his place in hell. Truly it was horrible, and Blake describes the ideal Swedenborgian hell with a power and vividness to which Swedenborg could never attain. The angel, not enjoying the sight, decamped; but no sooner was Blake alone than the horrible vision vanished, and he found himself “on a pleasant bank beside a river, by moonlight, hearing a harper, who sung to the harp.” The angel had drawn him into his state, and he saw what the angel saw. When he regained his real state, the vision was pleasant enough. Afterwards he rejoined the angel and undertook to show him his lot. An angel is necessarily above the modes of space and time. This one being religious, and therefore repressed to passivity, was shown a timeless, spaceless void, which was an eternal nightmare more unutterably fearful than anything in Swedenborg’s filthy sewer.
Finally Blake overheard a marvellously rich and splendid bit of conversation between a devil in a flame of fire and an angel seated on a cloud.
The devil pointed out how Jesus Christ was obedient to impulse, and how His obedience to His passionate energies—to the Voice of God within Him—made Him the Great Rebel and Law Breaker, mocking the sabbath and the sabbath’s God, guilty of the blood of His martyrs, exonerating the woman taken in adultery, living on the labour and sweat of wage-slaves, acquiescing in a false witness by His silence, coveting the best gifts for His disciples. It was a Pharisee who said, “All these laws have I kept from my youth,” and he became a dead soul. Jesus on the cross looked back on a pathway strewn with the corpses of the religious people He had killed in His fiery impetuous course, and instead of a death-repentance, He uttered the audacious word, “Father, into Thy Hands I commend My Spirit.”
The angel was converted. Embracing the flame of fire he was consumed, and rose again as Elijah—the prophet of spirit and fire.
And thus Blake took his leave of Swedenborg. He had expected too much of him and was disappointed. It was more than enough to hear his name on the lips of his pious, commonplace brother. He was indignant that he had not fulfilled his high-sounding pretensions, and “the voice of honest indignation,” he wrote, “is the voice of God.” But we who calmly look on can detect the voice of resentment too, which robs his departure of grace. But for Swedenborg The Marriage of Heaven and Hell had never been written. Swedenborg was the Goliath, strong in reason, logic, system, science, intellect, slain by the stone from David’s sling. Blake and not Swedenborg was “the true Samson shorn by the Churches.”