“God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes. He is become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remembered that creation is God descending according to the weakness of man: our Lord is the Word of God, and everything on earth is the Word of God, and in its essence is God.” Here certainly speaks the pantheist.
From the study of Blake’s writings the following points—and they are important to our future understanding of his art-work—stand out clearly defined. He believed in a great permeating unconditioned spirit—God—of whose nature men also partake, but subjected to the conditions and moral nature which result from sexual and generative humanity. And beside the unnameable supreme God there is another God, the creator Urizen, who is a sort of divine demon. He it is who has divided humanity into sexes, and inclosed the universal soul in separate bodies, and set up a code of morals which bears no relation to the supreme God, Who being altogether removed from, and above, the generative nature of man, does not Himself conform to “laws of restriction and forbidding.”
Urizen, who imprisons and torments conditioned humanity, is somehow subduable by this same humanity of his own invention, and Christ, the perfect man filled as full as may be with the Divine Spirit (for “a cup may not contain more than its capaciousness”), rises in the hearts of humanity, and effects its freedom, by aspiring past the Creator, to the Altogether Divine, and uniting with it.
Jehovah addressing Christ, as the highest type and flower of humanity, says to him, in the poem called the “Everlasting Gospel”:
If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me.
Thou art a man: God is no more:
Thine own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my spirit of life.
This makes us think of Blake’s follower, Walt Whitman, who in the same sort of turgid and chaotic poetry in which Blake wrote the prophetic books, but with no mystic clouds to shroud the meaning, has consistently developed this thought: “One’s self I sing, a simple separate person,” and “none has begun to think how divine he himself is,” etc.
In Blake’s conversations with Crabb Robinson, this mystic view of Christ is very apparent. “On my asking,” writes Mr. Robinson, “in what light he viewed the great questions of the duty of Jesus,” he said, “He is the only God. But then,” he added, “and so am I, and so are you.”
Keeping this point in view,—Blake’s belief in the identity of the Spirit of God behind all phenomena, the homogeneous character of the great creative Energy or Imagination expressing Itself through various forms and organisms,—another extract from Crabb Robinson’s diary will help us still nearer home to Blake’s point of view. He writes: “In the same tone, he said repeatedly, ‘The Spirit told me.’ I took occasion to say, ‘You express yourself as Socrates used to do. What resemblance do you suppose there is between your spirit and his?’ ‘The same as between our countenances.’ He paused and added, ‘I was Socrates,’ and then, as if correcting himself, ‘a sort of brother. I must have had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them.’ I suggested on philosophic grounds the impossibility of supposing an immortal being created an a parte post without an a parte ante. His eye brightened at this, and he fully concurred with me. ‘To be sure, it is impossible. We are all co-existent with God, members of the Divine Body. We are all partakers of the Divine Nature.’”
The latter words seem as ordinary and orthodox as on first reading his assertion that he was Socrates seems wild and mad. But all Blake really meant (and I think Crabb Robinson only half took his meaning) was, that the vegetative universe being a mere shadow, so are the accidents of personality, the age one is born into, the organic form which incloses the spirit. So his personality and that of Socrates, their imprisonment in the “vegetative” life were differences of no account, being transitory. But he and Socrates were one (or at least related) at the point where their spirits (the eternal verity) touched, and melted each into the other.
He understood the Bible in its spiritual sense. As to the natural sense, “Voltaire was commissioned by God to expose that. I have had much intercourse with Voltaire, and he said to me, ‘I blasphemed the Son of Man, and it shall be forgiven me, but they (the enemies of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not be forgiven them.’” This affords an instance of the manner in which Blake intuitively probed beneath the appearance, and divined the spirit beneath, discarding the fact or body with which it clothed itself. Another characteristic opinion of Blake’s, and one that moulded much of his work, is the following: