William Blake

The teaching

Taught from his own illuminated books, above all The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton and Jerusalem.

Contraries

Blake's teaching begins with a law of the soul: without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are all necessary to human existence, and from these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good, in their language, is the passive that obeys reason; evil is the active springing from energy. Blake does not ask which of the pair should win. A life, a nation and a faith grow by the strife of both, and to destroy either is to stop growing.

The errors of the Bibles

The Voice of the Devil in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell names three errors that all Bibles and sacred codes have taught: that a human being has two real principles, a body and a soul; that energy, called evil, is only from the body, and reason, called good, only from the soul; and that God will torment people in eternity for following their energies. Against them it sets three truths. A human being has no body distinct from the soul, for what is called the body is the portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age. Energy is the only life and is from the body, and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy. And energy is eternal delight.

The doors of perception

If the doors of perception were cleansed, Blake writes, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite; for man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. The work of art and of prophecy is to open them. He likens it to his own way of printing, which bites the copper with acids, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite that was hidden, and he calls it printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and medicinal.

Proverbs of Hell

In the same book he gathers the wisdom of energy into proverbs. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. The cistern contains; the fountain overflows. Exuberance is beauty. The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. What is now proved was once only imagined. Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead. Prudence, the narrow kind, he mocks as a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity. The proverbs are not rules of conduct but blows against a timid morality, meant to wake the reader's own energy.

Innocence and experience

The Songs of Innocence and of Experience show, as their title page says, the two contrary states of the human soul. In Innocence the child asks the lamb who made it, and answers: he who calls himself a lamb. In Experience the speaker stands before the tiger burning bright in the forests of the night and asks what immortal hand or eye could frame its fearful symmetry, and whether he who made the lamb made it too. Many songs come in pairs, the chimney sweeper, the nurse, Holy Thursday: the same scene seen with trust, and seen with knowledge of the world's cruelty.

Neither state is the whole truth. Innocence without knowledge is helpless and easily used; experience without vision hardens into fear and law. Blake's hope is a third state beyond both, an innocence that has passed through experience and keeps its eyes open, for innocence, he noted, dwells with wisdom, but never with ignorance.

Imagination, the divine body

Imagination, for Blake, is not fancy but the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable world is a faint shadow. The eternal body of man, he writes, is the imagination, that is God himself, the divine body, Jesus, and we are his members. To see by it is to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. He speaks of fourfold vision, the sight of the soul at its height, and prays to be kept from single vision and Newton's sleep: the eye that sees only what can be measured, and so sees a dead world.

The four mighty ones

In the long prophecies Blake gives this teaching as a myth. Albion, the eternal man, who is both England and all humankind, holds four mighty ones within him: Urizen, reason, who measures and makes laws; Luvah, love and passion; Tharmas, the body and its senses; and Urthona, the imagination, whose working form in time is Los, the smith and poet. When they quarrel and each seeks to rule, Albion falls into a deadly sleep, and the world of rigid law, war and fear is that sleep. Los labours at his furnaces through the ages, building Golgonooza, the city of art, and giving a body to falsehood so that it may be cast off for ever.

Los speaks Blake's own vow: I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare, my business is to create.

Mental fight and forgiveness

The war Blake calls for is mental fight. In the preface to Milton he asks for his bow of burning gold and his arrows of desire, and vows not to cease from mental fight, nor let his sword sleep in his hand, till Jerusalem is built in England's green and pleasant land. The enemy is the Selfhood, the part of a person that accuses others and justifies itself, and in Milton the poet goes down into death to annihilate his own. The heart of Christianity, as Jerusalem teaches it, is the forgiveness of sins: mutual forgiveness of each vice, he writes, such are the gates of Paradise.

Against the angels of Swedenborg

Blake had read Swedenborg closely, and his answer belongs to the teaching. Swedenborg, he writes, conversed with angels, who are all religious, and not with devils, who all hate religion, and so he wrote no new truth, only the old falsehoods. Any man of mechanical talents, he adds, could make ten thousand volumes as good from the writings of Paracelsus or Jakob Böhme. Truth, for Blake, is found by marrying heaven to hell, reason to energy, not by taking the angels' side.