“Forgiveness of sin is only at the judgment-seat of Jesus the Saviour, where the accuser is cast out, not because he sins, but because he torments the just, and makes them do what he condemns as sin, and what he knows is opposite to their own identity.”
And now I must gather together all the frayed ends of this diffuse but necessary chapter, and put the vital points, around which the seeming incongruities and strangenesses of Blake’s assertions arrange themselves, into a symmetrical if not an organic whole. The oneness of the Eternal Imagination, “Universal Poetic Genius,” or God the Spirit, was the golden background to Blake’s vision of life. And on this unity he saw contrasted the endless diversity of the spirit’s expression in phenomena. All error (not sin, which he did not believe to exist) came from the fall of the spirit (through Urizen the creator) into division and the sexual and generative life of man. This tended to a closing up of man into separate selfhoods, and each selfhood, in its effort to preserve its corporeal existence and separate character, was guilty of error, and gradually the inlets through which communication with the Universal Spirit was maintained became closed up, and were senses only available, in most men, for the uses of the natural world. This condition leads to spiritual negation, but is merely temporary, for when the body is destroyed at death, which is the Last Judgement, Urizen’s power is broken, and the soul, however attenuated (as long as not altogether atrophied), returns to its pristine union with the Universal Spirit, and, though completely merged in it, yet in some wonderful way it preserves its own identity, or essential quality, while the body, which is error, is “burnt up.” But even in the prison of the bodily life Humanity may be delivered from the cramping and negative effect of the selfhood, through Jesus Christ, who exists as the Human Divine in every heart, and who at the voice of the Universal Spirit rises from the grave of selfhood, and draws the Christian up into the life of that spirit where is no error nor negation.
It naturally follows that to Blake the one important point was to keep the senses, “the chief inlet of soul,” perpetually cleansed and open, that he might descry the Great Reality of which Nature and all her phenomena are but a symbol or shadow.
In fact, Blake’s hope for man lay in the contrary of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. The continuous evolution into new divisions and organisms, separate selfhoods and particles, was to him the falling of Urizen, head downwards, and bound with the snake of materiality, deeper and deeper into the abyss. By union, not division, by aspiring into the universal life, by conquering the selfhood and cleaving to the divine element (Jesus Christ) which exists in every human heart, Blake conceived that man might, if he would, find salvation, true vision, and everlasting life. His own vision was always double or symbolic, and he prayed to be delivered from “single vision” and “Newton’s sleep.” For the preoccupation with Nature as an end in itself and an object worthy of study was to him the great error, a sign of the horror of great darkness that clouded the human intelligence.
In moments of a special inrush of spiritual apprehension his vision was “threefold,” and sometimes “fourfold,” which suggests that vista behind vista unrolled itself, revealing untellable truth and beauty to his keen etherealized sight.
These things, not being matters of common experience, must be received and understood intuitively, and not Blake himself can always make them comprehensible to us. His language and visions recall the language and visions of the Prophet Ezekiel, whose writings were read and re-read by him till they created a frenzy of excitement in his sensitive brain.
His opinion of women, far from being in accordance with our modern emancipated views, was somewhat oriental, though among his poems we may find many instances of sweet and spiritual femininity.
When Urizen created Man and walled him up in his separate organism with five senses, like five small chinks in a cavern to let in the outside light, he gave him a dual nature, male and female, so that he was at first a hermaphrodite. “The female portion of man trying to get the ascendency of the male portion caused inward strife,” so a further subdivision occurred, and Man cast out his female portion, which became woman, and was a mere “emanation” of man. “There is no such thing in eternity as a female will,” writes Blake oracularly, his happy experience being based doubtless on the beautiful subjection of Catherine Blake to his own overmastering personality. Yet he is bound to exclaim in “Jerusalem,” “What may man be? Who can tell? But what may woman be, to have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave.” We may fairly say that the inferior shadowy nature which he imputes to woman was one of those opinions which he chose to adopt, though his real and unconscious belief regarding her was possibly very different. Be that as it may, he often makes her serve as a symbol for material existence, obviously an infelicitous parallel.
Having very briefly indicated the nature of Blake’s religious and mystical opinions, it remains for us to say a word about his mythology.
In a letter written to Mr. Butts while Blake was at Felpham, these lines occur among some verses, and will I think help us: