Blake’s great scheme is mainly in line with historical Christianity, which of course is catholicism. He starts with the eternal order and unity. Without attempting to explain the origin of evil, he narrates the fall out of unity and order into diversity and disorder, and how as a consequence of the fall creation appears. He is obliged to use the word “creation,” but there is no real creation in his cosmogony. There are only three possible theories of creation. Creation from within God, which is pantheism, and makes the universe an emanation; creation from something outside of God, which is dualism, and not likely to be accepted in the West; and creation out of nothing, which is catholicism. Blake learnt from Swedenborg the emanative theory. Swedenborg tried to avoid the pantheistic conclusion of his foundation principle, and believed that he had succeeded. His doctrine of the human God was certainly fine, and nearly catholic. Blake sways between the two. His doctrine of creation is pantheistic, but his affirmation that “God doth a human form display to those that dwell in realms of day” is splendidly catholic, and so, on the whole, is his doctrine of the fall. Since Blake’s day the problem has become enormously complicated, because we have to take account of the vestiges in man’s body of an animal ancestry, and the still more infallible signs in his soul of a divine origin. Perhaps we shall eventually all come to believe in both evolution and a special creation to account for man’s unique place in the universe. At any rate a denial of the fall involves a definite departure from historical Christianity, and it is important to see that it was an integral part of Blake’s scheme and without it that scheme falls to pieces. Not that he pressed the letter of the Adam and Eve story. It stood for him as a divinely simple witness of an ancient simplicity and unity from which man has departed by disobedience and the assertion of a life and a self independent of God. His way back into unity is by the cross of Jesus Christ, where the self-hood dies, and the day of judgment, which finally separates in him the gold from the dross, and presents him in his divine humanity perfect before the human-divine God.

Between these two stupendous facts—the fall and the redemption—Blake finds a place to say all that he wishes about the manifold things of heaven and earth and hell.

The unity from which man departs is made up of four mighty ones—the Four Zoas—who are the four beasts of the Apocalypse, taken from the four beasts of Ezekiel, who probably appropriated four of the many monstrous symbolical beasts of Assyria.

Blake invented names for them. Of these—Urizen, Urthona-Los, Luvah, and Tharmas—Urizen and Los are by far the clearest conceived figures. Perfect unity is maintained so long as Los is supreme. Reason is important in its right place. It becomes an evil when it usurps the place of imagination and thinks it can see as far. The essence of the fall is disorder. Redemption restores order, which is unity. Science alone breaks down because it is built up on observation and induction. Its observation is insufficient, for it is the observation of a shrunk universe. It gathers its materials through the five senses. But there are other avenues in regenerated man. If science were built up on the observation or vision of the whole instead of a very small part, it would become divine science and coincident with religion.

Religion breaks down whether built on nature or experience. If on nature, it is nature only as seen through limited vision; if on experience, it is the experience of fallen man, and therefore it is of vital force only when it transcends nature and becomes super-natural, and rests on a revelation not from man’s experience, however deep, but from God.

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ALBION.
From Jerusalem.

Deism was the particular time-heresy of Blake’s day. He came into direct contact with it through his friend Tom Paine. Deistic religion, to be adequate for man’s need, must rest on perfect nature and perfect experience. Paine, Voltaire, and Rousseau, in order to provide these conditions which they saw to be necessary, were driven to make the wild statement, contrary to all experience, that man is naturally holy and good, and if he is not so as we know him, it is because he is everywhere perverted by artificial civilization. Having swallowed this baseless assumption, the rest was easy. They had only like Godwin to manufacture some scheme of political justice, or like Rousseau to arrange a social contract, and then the Millennium would come.

Against all this Blake protested, but without personal heat. He was well aware of Paine’s deism, when he helped him to escape to France; and of Voltaire he wrote justly: “He has sinned against the Son of man, and it shall be forgiven him.” He protested and he affirmed: “Man is born a Spectre, or Satan, and is altogether an Evil.” In this uncompromising affirmation, taken out of the heart of Jerusalem, written at the mature age of forty-seven, he cuts himself off sharply, not only from the humanitarian deism of his time, but from the pantheism that invaded so many phases of his thought; he goes beyond the kindly catholic dogma which allows a residuum of original righteousness in fallen man; and, with Whitefield and the Calvinists, denies that he has any righteousness left at all. Hence the utter failure of all empiricism, and the absolute need of Revelation and a supernatural religion. How near he was getting to Dr Johnson! Super-nature, of course, presupposes nature. Blake was obliged to contemplate Nature, and meditate on the ancient difficulties that she still presents.