Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism

Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism Matthew J.A. Gr...

Author: Matthew J. A. Green

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Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism

Matthew J.A. Green

Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake

Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism Matthew J.A. Green

© Matthew J.A. Green 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4231–9 (hardback) ISBN-10: 1–4039–4231–5 (hardback) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, Matthew, J.A., 1975– Visionary materialism in the early works of William Blake : the intersection of enthusiasm and empiricism / Matthew J.A. Green. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1–4039–4231–5 (cloth) 1. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Philosophy. 2. Materialism in literature. 3. Enthusiasm in literature. 4. Empiricism in literature. 5. Visions in literature. I. Title. PR4148.P5G74 2005 821′.7––dc22 2004060647 10 14

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my wife, Louise, without whom none of this would be possible

He only who has enjoyed immortal moments can reproduce them. – John Casper Lavater

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

A Note on Texts and Illustrations

x

Introduction: Blake and His Traditions

1

1 Experiences of Empiricism Blake and Locke: Friendship and enmity Closet and cavern Priestley and the material soul

10 15 26 34

2 The Tree of Mystery Obscurity and the sublime Infinity: Causes and consequences The corporealisation of thought ‘Surgeing Sulphureous fluid’: The case of Urizen

41 44 50 56 61

3 Right Reason and ‘Sense Supernaturall’ ‘Where else is heaven?’: The ranting impulse and inner light The spiritual substance The abyssal eye

71 73 82 91

4 The Opening Eye ‘He conversed with Angels’ Divine vision as political force

100 105 126

5 The Ark of God ‘What is Man!’ The first principle Perception, liberty and organic light The bounding line Outlining the vessels of Eternity

131 134 137 139 153 162

vii

viii Contents

6 The Sublime Act Incarnations and inheritance

171 181

Notes

191

Bibliography

204

Index

210

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Louise Mullany for her invaluable support and inspiration. I would also like to express my gratitude to Edward Larrissy for all of his suggestions, guidance and continued belief in this work, as well as to Mark Vessey and Lino Colonello whose lessons, not all of them easy, and wisdom have contributed more to this project than perhaps they know. Thanks also to my parents, Robert and Ann, for teaching me the value of principles and respect for the written word; to Chris and Ted, for the pub lunches, late night chats and so much more; and to Amanda and Alan, for the laughter and for keeping me grounded in something like reality. This project has also benefited from the advice given by John Whale and David Worrall in its earlier stages; from the comments of the anonymous reviewer, which pushed it that little bit further; and from the generosity of Keri Davies, who provided me with indispensable material on the Moravians, and Claire Colebrook, whose thoughts on Derrida have proved a valuable complement to my own. Thanks are also due to Emily Rosser and Paula Kennedy, who between them have seen the manuscript down the road to publication. And finally, thanks to Jason, for sharing my enthusiasm for Blake in the early days and first suggesting the infernal reaching of Blake’s ‘sublime act’.

ix

A Note on Texts and Illustrations All Blake quotations are from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, revised edition (London: Doubleday, 1988), edited by David V. Erdman; hereafter abbreviated as ‘E’. References to the illuminated books are given by plate number and, where applicable, line number (l.). Except where otherwise noted, I have followed Erdman’s ordering and numbering of plates. The annotations to Lavater and Swedenborg are referred to by section/paragraph number (§) or page number (p.) from the original text, whichever applies, followed by the page number from Erdman. All references to prose material is referred to by page number. Quotations from Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding are taken from the edition by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), and are referred to by section number (§). All of the visual material from Blake’s work is available for consultation on The William Blake Archive <www.blakearchive.org.uk>.

x


[A]s I understand Vice it is a Negative—It does not signify what the laws of Kings & Priests have calld Vice we who are philosophers ought not to call the Staminal Virtues of Humanity by the same name that we call the omissions of intellect springing from poverty – William Blake, Annotations to Aphorisms on Man1 When Blake, in the final pages of his annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, refers to himself and the Swiss theologian as ‘philosophers’, it might be tempting to dismiss this appellation as a mere rhetorical flourish within a rather obscure piece of antinomian mysticism. Indeed, the promotion of active ‘virtue’ in opposition to ‘vicious’ restraint and the rejection of ‘Sin’ as a concept seem far closer to radical Protestant enthusiasm than to the style of philosophy that the late eighteenth century inherited from figures such as Locke, Newton and Bacon (ibid.). To be sure, a number of apparently contradictory meanings converge in the ‘philosopher’, who may be learned in one or more branches of knowledge ranging from the rational and natural to the occult and even magical. In what follows, I will argue that Blake’s early works evince a philosophical position that expands the boundaries of what it is conceivable to know, exceeding the restraints and exclusivity built into competing discourses of enlightenment and counter-enlightenment. Nevertheless, Blake articulates his ‘strong objection to Lavater’s principles’, which appears on the final pages in his copy of Aphorisms on Man, by splicing together the twin discourses of enthusiasm and empiricism: the language of ‘accident’ and ‘Causes & Consequences’, employed by Locke and his descendants, is interwoven with talk of ‘bad or good 1

2 Visionary Materialism in Blake

spirits’, of ‘God & heavenly things’, which are presented as topics of first-hand, revelatory experience. This reading of Blake is deeply indebted to the conception of him as a bricoleur, first mooted by Larrissy, who remarks upon the ‘curious conjuncture’ of diverse traditions in Blake’s works, noting that ‘there are elements in each tradition which conflict with elements in the others’ and suggesting that ‘Blake has to “graft” different discourses onto each other’.2 However, the very possibility of such a graft indicates certain systemic or doctrinal affinities, however well-concealed by a rhetoric of mutual opposition. The grounding of knowledge in a mode of experience derived through the body, conceived alternately as spiritual or material, operates as a common tenet within Blake’s intellectual inheritance and it forms the basis of the world-view that underpins his imaginative endeavours. The incommensurate legacy, at once ontological and epistemological, that provides the raw cultural materials of Blake’s art can aptly be described as ‘visionary materialism’, a term intended to highlight the highly politicised convergence of variant traditions whilst remaining sensitive to their differences and to the contradictions generated by this coming together. Blake himself does not use this term, though he does speak at length of ‘vision’, which in a spiritual sense is often conjoined with ‘inspiration’, both divine and artistic. Thus we find him praising Lavater’s provision of ‘A vision of the Eternal Now—’ (§407; E592), claiming ‘Inspiration & Vision’ as ‘my Eternal Dwelling place’ (Annotations to Reynolds, p. 244; E660–1), and describing the ‘dark visions of Los’ (Urizen, 15.12; E78) viewed from Eternity. There is nothing ephemeral about such visions – ‘This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision’, Blake tells Trusler, ‘I see Every thing I paint’ (23 August 1799; E702) – and it is not only possible, but indeed beneficial to view the visionary in the context of a certain mode of ‘materialism’ produced through a fusion of natural philosophy, social critique and prophetic experience. While the description of Blake as a materialist may at first appear counterintuitive, such a reading highlights not only Blake’s sense of the interplay between social relations and material conditions – between spirit and body – but also emphasises the possibility of radical transformation, of universal redemption, that we find articulated throughout his work. Blake’s rejection of the body–soul dichotomy remains consistent throughout his earliest works and those produced in Lambeth. The extent to which Blake’s thought in this area changes after the turn of the century remains a matter of considerable scholarly debate that is, however, beyond the scope of the present discussion. In any case, even when seemingly at his most dualistic, in descriptions of the spiritual world as opposed to the natural


3

world, Blake represents the former as a place that he knows first and foremost through direct perception: ‘I know it for I see it’ (To Hayley, 11 December 1805; E767). A careful consideration of Blake’s cultural context provides numerous antecedents and contemporaneous analogues to the combination of spiritual perception and an emphasis on embodiment that produces the spiritually charged materialism that we find throughout his early work. This context includes Joseph Priestley’s work on physical bodies and chemical reactions, Erasmus Darwin’s study of organic bodies, the theosophical representations of spiritual bodies in Emanuel Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme, and the focus on Christ’s corporeal existence and suffering in Moravian spirituality. My application of the term ‘visionary materialism’ to Blake’s outlook rises out of a similarly multiplicious scholarly tradition and is indebted to generations of Blake scholars, with perhaps the greatest debt owed to Frye’s distinction between the mystic, who seeks an incommunicable spiritual communion with the divine, and the visionary, who ‘creates or dwells in, a higher spiritual world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transfigured and charged with a new intensity of symbolism’. Frye’s classification of Blake as one of the latter already speaks to the prominence of empirical views in Blake’s thought, though Frye’s own readings, particularly of the opposition between Blake and Locke, will be strongly interrogated in subsequent chapters. A similar indebtedness can be attributed to Beer’s description of Blake’s style as ‘visionary-realist’, a term intended to describe the effect of combining an ‘experience of humanity and society’ with ‘the more imaginative statements of the mystics’. In more recent scholarship, there are also affinities with Ferber’s ‘social materialism’ and Connolly’s ‘mysticalempiricism’, though following Frye my discussion finds ‘visionary’ more applicable to Blake than ‘mystical’.3 The investigation of Blake’s representations of the conjunction between the spiritual and the material, between man and God, undertaken in the following pages is conducted with a view to enhancing an understanding of his ideas about human identity, artistic production, interpretative practices and the redemptive potential of interpersonal exchange. It considers the significant intersection of eighteenth-century empiricism and radical Protestantism in Blake’s representations of textuality, of the deity and of corporeal existence. The detailed examination of Blake’s response to this complex interplay of, on the one hand, approaches to knowledge and perception and, on the other, exegetical practices and ontological theories provides insight into his relationship with the dominant philosophical


and religious discourses of his period. Moreover, such an enquiry fosters an increased understanding of Blake’s belief in the messianic capacity of human beings and the redemptive potential of his own art, produced through his unique method of illuminated printing. The importance of the Bible, of God and of the body within Blake’s texts has been widely discussed by scholars too numerous to name here, but who will appear throughout subsequent chapters. Similarly, much has been written about Blake’s antagonism towards Lockean epistemology and his anxieties over the growing authority of empirical science. However, despite his uncompromising accusation that the Enlightenment empiricists ‘mock Inspiration & Vision’ and despite his insistence that he feels nothing but ‘Contempt & Abhorrence’ for them (Annotations to Reynolds, p. 244; E660), these issues are far from clear. Frye’s comments on the matter are characteristic of the firmly established assumption that ‘as Locke [. . .] is constantly in Blake’s poetry a symbol of every kind of evil, superstition and tyranny, whatever influence he had on Blake was clearly a negative one’ (p. 14). This view has been brought under increasing criticism in recent years by scholars such as Clark and Glausser, who argue that despite Blake’s overt opposition to empiricism, and to Locke in particular, there are many similarities between the two writers. These include a radical response to the political institutions dominant in their respective lifetimes, an emphasis on clarity of vision, a sense of the importance of mental effort and a belief in an inclusive Christianity.4 An accurate understanding of Blake’s relation to Locke, and to empiricism in general, is particularly significant because it bears directly upon his ideas about man’s mental and sensory capabilities, which themselves relate to both his understanding of ontology and of theology, as the manner in which one perceives reality has an immediate effect on one’s ability to engage with the divine as manifest in both human and artistic forms. For many years, scholars have acknowledged that Blake’s theological position is extensively influenced by a variety of occult and enthusiastic traditions. Two of the foundational texts in this area are Raine’s Blake and Tradition and Hirst’s Hidden Riches, both of which provide extensive discussions of Blake’s relation to hermetic and Kabbalistic traditions as mediated by Emanuel Swedenborg, Jacob Boehme and William Law, among others.5 More recently, Mee and Thompson have demonstrated the importance of considering Blake’s relationship to lesser-known enthusiasts and Protestant sects, with Mee focusing on figures living and writing during Blake’s lifetime, such as Richard Brothers, and Thompson tracing a line of radical, anti-rational sectarian ideas from the seventeenth century through to the 1800s.6 As will no doubt become clear in the following


5

pages, I find many of Thompson’s arguments convincing, although there are also points at which our readings differ. Thus, while I would agree with his warning that we must beware of making overly academic assumptions about Blake, I also believe that Raine provides an insightful discussion of, for example, his adaptation of Behmenist doctrine. Thompson’s influence is perhaps felt most strongly in my treatment of the Ranters and Muggletonians, though here too we differ slightly in our approaches. Moreover, the recent work of Davies and Schuchard has disproved Thompson’s hypothesis that Blake’s mother was a Muggletonian, demonstrating instead that she was in fact linked to the Moravians, a connection with many implications for our own understanding of Blake.7 The beliefs and practices of this influential religious community intersect in several significant ways with Blake’s own epistemological and ontological perspectives, as discussed in Chapter 4. Nevertheless, the religious views of the Ranters and Muggletonians remain valuable in exploring the relationship between experience and faith in anti-rationalist strands of radical Protestantism. In particular, reading the Ranters and Muggletonians alongside their contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, highlights some hitherto unacknowledged points of intersection, facilitating a comprehensive interrogation of the rigid dichotomisation of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘counter-enlightenment’ implicit in the work of Thompson and others. As suggested above, Blake’s responses to epistemological debates are interconnected with his thoughts on religious matters. However, to date there has been little done to bridge the increasingly disparate gap between the reassessment of Blake’s relationship to enlightenment epistemologies on the one hand, and the connections being made with antinomian and anti-rational movements on the other. This is surprising given the fact that the scholars working in each of these areas do not, for the most part, seem to regard themselves as situated in opposing camps. For example, in two recent books edited by Clark and Worrall, Historicizing Blake and Blake in the Nineties,8 articles on eighteenth-century science and empiricism sit comfortably alongside articles on antinomianism and Swedenborgian theosophy. There is widespread recognition that Blake’s incorporation of ideas from one movement or tradition does not preclude a shared involvement with others. Thus, while Mee argues that, in certain respects, Blake ‘has more in common with an enthusiast like the visionary Richard Brothers than the perhaps better known millenarianism of Dissenters like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley’, he also notes the significance of Priestley with regard to Blake’s attacks on dualism (Dangerous Enthusiasm, pp. 20, 138).


That Blake was the recipient of such a multiplicious inheritance should not surprise us, given that as a poet, visual artist and commercial engraver he was positioned at a particularly complex ideological juncture. Blake’s family background acquainted him with the language of enthusiasm and he was certainly exposed to alternative religious traditions, but as a poet he was similarly well versed in the only slightly more mainstream Protestantism passed down by Milton and Bunyan. His interest in Swedenborg and Boehme brought him into contact with Judeo-Christian mysticism, while his early reading of Bacon, Newton and Locke familiarised him with the philosophy behind the new empirical science. Moreover, his somewhat ambiguous position within the Matthews and Johnson circles both placed him on the periphery of ‘polite society’, with its notions of taste, culture and sensibility, and acquainted him with the political and scientific thought of writers such as Priestley, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Darwin. In order to form an accurate picture of Blake’s radical inheritance – which is at once political, religious and intellectual – we must take this diversity into account. Not only are we unable to assume that Blake’s inheritance was homogeneous, we cannot take his injunctions against Locke and Newton as evidence that he remained unaffected by the philosophical and scientific upheavals occurring around him. Rather, we must ask ourselves what this excessive animosity towards, and repeated attacks on, the forefathers of the British Enlightenment conceals. If we are to accept Thompson’s maxim that ‘an intense sectarian dispute is often the signal of an affinity’ (p. 66), we must rethink Blake’s relationship to spiritual opponents such as Locke, whose texts are no less religious than Blake’s own. While Blake’s relationship to Locke has been considerably reassessed by the scholars noted above, these recent developments in Blake scholarship have opened the way for the forging of new connections between Blake’s diverse inheritances. In particular, the following pages examine the manner in which Lockean empiricism, with its ‘continued religious basis’ (Clark, ‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, p. 134), interacts with the theosophical and/or anti-rational discourses of enthusiastic and ‘counterenlightenment’ writers, who despite their differences demonstrate an affinity with Locke’s emphasis on the primacy of experience and perception. The idea of such a shared experiential impulse will be discussed at length in Chapters 1–4, which provide a detailed discussion of both the points of unity and of the variety apparent in Blake’s multifarious inheritance. Along similar lines, later chapters investigate the manner in which Blake fuses concepts and terms from scientific discourses with spiritual doctrines and meanings. On another level, my consideration


7

of his response to Priestley’s materialism integrates an exploration of the materiality of Blake’s own works with specific reference to recent developments in our understanding of the processes involved in illuminated printing. In seeking to draw together the various strands of our Blakean inheritance, which is comprised both of the cultural heritage that informs his work and of the many subsequent discussions of that work, this study attempts to combine an investigation of Blake’s work inside a broader history of ideas with a historically minded approach that considers the social and political contexts in which that work is produced. Blake clearly believed that he could hold his own against the forefathers of British empiricism and modern science more generally, but his cultural and historical placement has a direct impact on both the combative procedures and the resources available in such mental war. Central to the ensuing discussion is a commitment to reading Blake’s response to the Enlightenment as a serious engagement with philosophical issues that is nevertheless informed by his proximity to alternative traditions and practices that call into question fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human, interrogating concepts of identity and variety, self and other. As the title indicates, this study focuses primarily on Blake’s early works, and specifically those produced between 1788 and 1795. The significance of these dates is twofold. On a thematic level, there remains considerable disagreement on when, and indeed if, Blake’s thoughts on religious, philosophical and political issues began to move away from the outwardlooking stance of his early works and into the more mythical and transcendental position often ascribed to his later ones. Whilst a detailed engagement with this debate is beyond the scope of this book, his thought during the period under consideration appears both sustained and consistent. On another level, this sense of overall coherence is demonstrated by the production history of the texts themselves. Although Blake continually experimented with his methods of production, this period in Blake’s artistic career is framed by the composition of the earliest illuminated texts, All Religions and No Natural Religion, in 1788 and, as Viscomi notes, the production of ‘a set of twelve or thirteen large-paper copies of his entire canon in relief etching’.9 This suggests a culmination of Blake’s artistic production after which he moved on to produce the Small Book Designs and Large Book Designs before beginning work on longer works such as The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Nevertheless, while my focus will be on Blake’s earlier texts, there are certain instances when a consideration of later texts will be both necessary and profitable, particularly in reference to his attacks on empiricism and his discussion


of Paine, both of which are presented most overtly in his annotations to Reynolds’ Works and Watson’s Apology for the Bible. The contextual material that I will discuss has been selected with a view towards balancing the claims of the variety of diverse traditions in the eighteenth century with those that bear most directly on Blake and on the topics under immediate consideration. For the most part, I have opted to provide a detailed consideration of key texts within a given tradition or movement rather than attempting to provide an overview of a larger number of texts, which would, in a study of this scope, result in an overly general or cursory discussion. Thus, for example, Locke figures prominently in the sections on empiricism, while Bacon and Newton – the other two persons in Blake’s ‘Satanic trinity’ – are discussed in less detail,10 a decision motivated by the fact that Locke provides the most in-depth discussion of empirical epistemology. However, the use of Locke as a representative of an entire school of thought risks implying that empiricism, even as it is defined within the narrow bounds of ‘enlightenment’ sciences and philosophies, is constituted by a unified and consistent body of thought rather than the expression of related, but distinct, ideas and methodologies. Therefore, while an examination of cultural context necessitates a certain degree of generalisation, I have attempted to particularise wherever possible. For example, when I refer to categories such as ‘Lockean empiricism’, I am referring primarily to the ideas of Locke himself, as expressed through his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, although included in this is the sense of a wider tradition including not only Bacon and Newton, but also subsequent philosophers, such as Hume and Priestley, who explicitly connect Locke’s ideas with their own even while challenging many of his assumptions. A similar principle of selectivity and a comparable attempt to balance the demands of the general and the particular inform my discussion of other traditions, such as those known under the banners of radical Protestantism, enthusiasm and mysticism. Additionally, my decisions regarding the inclusion and the exclusion of contextual material have been informed by the projects that Blake himself worked on as an engraver. The most relevant of these are Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy and Cumberland’s Thoughts on Outline. Despite Worrall’s thorough elucidation of the connections between Blake and Darwin,11 the impact of botany and nascent biology on Blake’s thought remains under-explored. Nevertheless, Blake’s willingness to integrate newly emergent ideas and phenomena explored by late eighteenth-century scientific discourses with those from more explicitly spiritual texts bears directly upon the process of ‘grafting’ described by


9

Larrissy. Lavater’s Essays, together with his Aphorisms, provide a bridge between discourses that are more recognisably scientific and those that appear to be more spiritual in nature. Blake’s annotations to Aphorisms are especially informative in this respect. In the final chapters, therefore, I present a detailed and systematic investigation of both Aphorisms and Essays which, drawing on concepts from physiognomy, aims to yield new insight into Blake’s understanding of the juncture between natural and spiritual life. In these chapters I also present a discussion of the connection between the friendship and the artistic ideals shared by Blake and Cumberland, on the one hand, and, on the other, Blake’s own thoughts on the relationship between essence and outline, which inform his critique of the Lockean self. To my knowledge, this connection between Blake’s engagement with Cumberland’s artistic projects and his thoughts on epistemology has not been acknowledged and, as I hope to demonstrate, it provides not only a new, but indeed a significant, context in which to consider both Blake’s response to Locke and the artistic ideals that inform his notion of redemptive vision. Ultimately, this project seeks to draw together several seemingly disparate discourses from within current Blake scholarship and the philosophical, religious and enthusiastic traditions which informed his own artistic productions. It is my hope that it will help to clarify Blake’s response to the Enlightenment, as embodied in figures such as Locke, at the same time suggesting points of intersection amongst a diverse collection of alternative traditions often described as ‘counter-enlightenment’. Moreover, the exploration of these issues will be undertaken with a view to understanding the manner in which Blake’s ideas about redemption and humanity are related to his thoughts on art, prophecy and the perceptibility of God.

1 Experiences of Empiricism

As the true method of knowledge is experiment the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of. – William Blake, All Religions are One (E1) Blake’s annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds present his most overt declarations against the epistemology that he associates with Locke, Newton and Bacon. The fact that he responds to the philosophy behind Reynolds’ aesthetics is doubly significant. Not only does it say something about his response to philosophical issues, which is primarily artistic, but it also indicates his sense that art, and the judgement that assigns it value cannot be disentangled from the philosophical, or indeed political, frameworks within which it is produced. Art must not only be pleasing to the eye, but it must be intellectually and politically sound, an attitude that requires us to pay particular attention to the philosophical debates and positionings embedded throughout the illuminated books, no less than in the annotations, catalogues and letters that have survived alongside them. On the surface, Blake’s declaration that ‘Innate Ideas. are in Every Man Born with him’ seems incompatible with the forms of sensationist empiricism and inductive science put forward by Locke, Newton and Bacon (Annotations to Reynolds, p. 59; E648). Similarly, his subsequent labelling of ‘The Man who says that we have No Innate Ideas’ as ‘a Fool & Knave. Having no Con-Science ’ sits uneasily beside weaker forms of empiricism, suggesting that science is itself innate (ibid.). Moreover, the connection that Blake posits between denying innate ideas and lacking a ‘Con-Science’ adds a moral dimension to the rejection of Locke’s tabula rasa at the same time as it motions towards a conception 10

Experiences of Empiricism

11

of ‘Science’ that precedes, and is therefore not limited to, sense perception as defined by the philosophy of the five senses. However, this insistence on ‘Innate Science’ does not necessarily entail a rejection of empiricism or the experimental method. Two pages later, Blake attacks ‘the Little Bacon’ for saying that ‘Every Thing must be done by Experiment’ and then saying that ‘Art must be producd Without such Method’ (p. 61; E648). Blake himself was a great experimenter in the artistic domain, not only with his development and use of illuminated printing, but also with his constant attempts to improve that process through modifications such as his experiments with colour printing. Blake’s attack on Bacon represents a criticism of what he regards as Bacon’s exclusion of experiment from art, rather than his advocacy of experimentalism itself. Blake reads this lack of consistency, which Bacon passes down to Reynolds, as ‘Self-Contradiction & Knavery’ (ibid.), once again linking philosophical inadequacy with hypocrisy and deception. Blake’s claim that the Poetic Genius is ‘the true faculty of knowing’ because it is ‘the faculty which experiences’ suggests that ‘Innate Science’ does not represent a set of pre-inscribed maxims or doctrines so much as an innate ability to perceive, to hear ‘the voice of God’ which he declares, in opposition to Watson and Locke, is the true ‘Conscience’ (All Religions; E1; Annotations to Watson, p. 2; E613). As White notes, Blake’s critique of Bacon, Newton and Locke points towards ‘a poetic, rather than a logical genius initiating advances in science’, and he highlights a number of intersections between Blake and his Enlightenment forebears.1 White’s analysis suggests that ‘Blake’s larger purpose in attacking the logic of experimentalism was [. . .] to re-affirm the idea of scientific progress in light of explanations which implied that science could succeed only within an essentially fixed and stable world order’ and that he ‘appears to have adopted the very concerns and some of the same metaphors of empirical philosophy in his criticism of it’ (ibid.). The figure of the mill is a case in point as this image was used by advocates of empiricism against traditional logic and is adopted by Blake to question the supposed rationality of experimental science. In White’s view, Blake suggests that experimental science progresses upon imaginative rather than logical associations and therefore ‘[points] the way to something like a poetic, rather than a logical genius initiating advances in science’ (111). That Blake believed in a redemptive science, or more precisely in the role played by science in redemption, is particularly evident in later texts such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The description of apocalypse at the end of The Four Zoas is particularly notable as it is brought on by


the redemption, rather than rejection, of Urizenic philosophy. On the penultimate page, ‘Dark Urthona’ takes ‘the Corn out of the Stores of Urizen’ and grinds them ‘in his rumbling Mills’ (p. 138, ll. 1–2; E406). Rather than destroying the mills altogether, the potentially destructive forces of ‘Thunders Earthquakes Fires Water floods’ tend ‘the dire mills’ on Urthona’s behalf (p. 138, ll. 7, 9; E406). Bearing in mind White’s discussion of the emblematic value of the mill in Blake’s work, these lines would seem to suggest the radical opening up of empiricism by the forces of prophetic wrath. The human effect of such milling is initially negative, and the poem describes men bound ‘to sullen contemplations’ who ‘in their inmost brain / Feeling the crushing Wheels’ rise and ‘write the bitter words / Of stern Philosophy & knead the bread of knowledge’ (ll. 12–15). However, the action in the mills is redeemed by Urthona, who uses the grain to make ‘the Bread of Ages’, transforming the instrument of limitation (the mill) into a tool that will permit humanity to ‘behold the Angelic spheres’ and ‘the depths of wondrous worlds’ (ll. 23, 25): [. . .] Urthona rises from the ruinous walls In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science For intellectual War The war of swords departed now The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns (p. 139, ll. 7–10; E407) These are the last lines of the poem and the fact that Blake decides to end this vision of apocalypse with the reign of ‘sweet Science’ suggests that the works of the prophet and the ‘scientist’ need not be divorced. In fact, the use of mill as a two-sided emblem to refer alternately to a misguided labouring after falsehood and to the search for spiritual truth is something he likely picked up from the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences: By grinding at the mill, in a good sense, is meant examination and confirmation of spiritual truth; but in a bad sense by mill is signified the search after and confirmation of what is false.2 The mill thus represents the possibility of transforming false enquiry into an enhanced spiritual experience, and its usage not only in The Four Zoas, but also in No Natural Religion, points towards the reclamation of empirical modes of thought. A similar suggestion of redemption through association appears at the end of Jerusalem, where Bacon, Newton


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and Locke stand alongside the fathers of English literature, motioning towards the notion of an incredibly complex inheritance that emphasises the unity of the not yet dichotomised arts and sciences: ‘The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven / And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer’ (98.8–9; E257). Despite the obvious interconnection between the three persons in Blake’s satanic trinity, it is Locke who in the early works is, in Hagstrum’s words, the ‘chief villain’.3 Locke’s importance, in the eighteenth century and beyond, to epistemological issues such as the self’s relation to the body and to the external world is widely acknowledged and Clark makes a persuasive case for regarding Locke’s Essay as a ‘formative influence’ on Blake, which ‘continues to determine the underlying metaphorical structures of texts otherwise as generically dissimilar as prose aphorisms There is No Natural Religion, satirical treatise The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, burlesque cosmogony The Book of Urizen and manuscript epic The Four Zoas’ (‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, p. 133).4 Hagstrum, meanwhile, comments upon Locke’s more widespread influence on eighteenth-century literature, remarking that ‘Lockean psychology had insinuated itself into the work of virtually every neoclassical writer’ (p. 70). Moreover, Locke’s presence at Jerusalem’s apocalypse suggests that Blake senses at least a partial affinity with him and we can speculate that his overall response to Locke involves a process of filtering, sifting and criticising not dissimilar to the manner in which he responds to his Miltonic inheritance. The early tractates, All Religions are One and No Natural Religion [a] and [b], provide a case in point. Hagstrum argues that the tractates constitute a ‘psychological attack on empirical rationalism’ and ‘establish the most fundamental and irreconcilable polarities of Blake’s thought – between the “Poetic or Prophetic character” and the “Philosophical & Experimental”’ (p. 69). While Blake does oppose the notion that man ‘is only a natural organ subject to Sense’ with the proclamation that ‘Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception’ (No Natural Religion [a], [b]; E2), the ‘irreconcilable’ polarisation of the poetic and the philosophical which Hagstrum describes requires some qualification. While these two modes of experience can, perhaps, be conceptualised as Blakean contraries, the progression from the known to the unknown seems to rely upon a particular understanding of their relationship that perceives the manner in which opposing forces can work together. Blake’s conclusion that ‘If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still’ (No Natural Religion [b]; E3) implies that the ‘Poetic


or Prophetic character’ functions as the inspiration or driving force that renders the ‘Philosophic & Experimental’ productive, rather than negating philosophy and experimental science altogether. In effect, philosophy and experiment provide the structure or skeleton of thought that the poetic impulse animates, just as, in The Marriage, reason provides the bounds within which energy becomes manifest and just as the human body provides the medium through which that called spirit participates in human existence. Blake makes clear the necessity of this reciprocal relationship in the ‘Application’ of the tract’s conclusion, where he tells us ‘He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only’ (ibid.). While it may seem that the perception of ‘Infinite’ and ‘God’ reduces man and the ‘Ratio’ to insignificance, such an interpretation is an inversion rather than an expansion of the sensationist philosophies themselves. As such, it simply replaces one ratio for another, for those who see God without seeing man fail to recognise the nature of the relation between the two: ‘God becomes as we are, / that we may be / as he / is’ (ibid.). The seven principles of All Religions support this reading, extrapolating upon, rather than refuting, the empirical tenet sounded in its argument and revising the empiricist’s position by redefining ‘the faculty which experiences’ rather than by rejecting the premise that experience is the source of knowledge. The fact this argument occurs at the beginning of Blake’s illuminated book-making project (c. 1788) is significant, as is the fact that Blake reprinted the tract in 1795 after he had engraved and printed Urizen with its scathing attacks on both empirical philosophy and orthodox religion. First, it makes any characterisation of Blake as an artist entirely antipathetic to empiricism somewhat problematic. More than that, it suggests that the role Blake constructs for himself in the early tractates owes something to the empirical method advanced by early enlightenment figures such as Locke, Newton and Bacon – a suggestion reinforced by their prosaic style, as well as their quasi-logical division into principles, arguments and counter-arguments. Far from rejecting empiricism entirely, Blake’s critique of Lockean empiricism, like those of Berkeley and Hume, does not necessarily place him outside the empirical tradition altogether. While Berkeley rejects the division of reality into the mental and the material, and while Hume criticises the circularity of the experimental method, Blake’s criticisms of enlightenment empiricism take issue with the narrow boundaries within which experience itself is defined.5 This is not to say that Blake’s philosophical position was identical to that of either Berkeley or Hume. There are


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important differences amongst all three writers, which reinforce the sense that enlightenment empiricism was not a stable or unitary tradition and that the disagreements between empiricists were no less significant than their shared emphasis on the primacy of experience.

Blake and Locke: Friendship and enmity In August 2000, the University of Essex at Colchester hosted a conference provocatively entitled Friendly Enemies: Blake and the Enlightenment, which sought to re-examine the inheritance of modernity at the outset of the current millennium. In addition to the obvious relevance of those discussions to the present investigation, the framing of this dialogue within the antipodes of friendship and enmity is itself highly topical. The seemingly oxymoronic yoking together of the amicable and inimical speaks to the multiplicity and contradictions inherent in the act of inheritance as a process of negotiation, of giving and receiving, call and response. But more than this, the friendly enemy intimately involves him or herself in the relations between self and other, calling into question the very possibility of distinguishing friend from foe, truth from falsity, essence from appearance. As such, it not only characterises a particular type of relationship, Blake’s response to Locke for example, but also draws attention to the very points of contention – moral, epistemic and ontological – that give shape and definition to the relationship itself. The problems involved in discriminating friends from enemies occupied Blake throughout his life, both personally and artistically, and a closer inspection of the friendly enemy serves to open out the present discussion in a number of perhaps unexpected directions. ‘I fear I have not many enemies’, Blake writes in response to Lavater’s claim that ‘You may depend upon it that he is a good man whose intimate friends are all good, and whose enemies are characters decidedly bad’ (§151; E587). We should not be misled by the apparent artlessness of this comment, however. Even as he is worrying about an apparent lack of enemies, he is calling into question the moral positioning of an author whom he clearly considers a friend and whose identity, moreover, remains subject to a certain amount of debate.6 The confidence with which Lavater speaks of moral absolutes is something for which Blake takes him to task elsewhere in the marginalia and he describes Aphorism 71 as ‘an oversight’, rejecting Lavater’s naïve suggestion that hypocrisy cannot mimic ‘humility and love united’, ‘for what are all crawlers but mimickers of humility & love’ (E586). And again, in Lavater’s advice that ‘the great art to love your enemy consists in never


losing sight of MAN in him’, we find Blake challenging the definition of enmity itself: none can see the man in the enemy if he is ignorantly so, he is not truly an enemy if maliciously not a man I cannot love my enemy for my enemy is not man but beast & devil if I have any. I can love him as a beast & wish to beat him[.] (§248; E589). The true enemy is entirely other, less than human and more than human at the same time, a beast and devil. It is only as a beast that Blake can love his enemy, but this love itself is inextricable from the impulse to dominate and injure: ‘I can love him [. . .] & wish to beat him.’ Then again, it is entirely possible that such enemies do not exist, for Blake still clings to the possibility that he might not have any. In the waves of anti-jacobinism that swept through London following the French Revolution, however, Blake sees the enemy exerting its power in the persecution of figures such as Paine and Priestley, the series of sedition trials and, in 1798, the imprisonment of Joseph Johnson. On the title page of Watson’s Apology for the Bible, Blake declares that ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life’ for ‘The Beast & the Whore rule without controls.’ Accordingly, he reports, ‘I have been commanded from Hell not to print this as it is what our Enemies wish’ (E611).7 Despite such apocalyptic rhetoric, the annotations themselves retain a certain sense of ambiguity when it comes to forging allegiances with different sorts of devils. Whereas Blake clearly aligns himself with hell against ‘our Enemies’, it is a strange hell that opposes the whore and the beast of revelation and the ‘Powers of Satan’ (p. 6; E614). Likewise although as Erdman remarks his exclamation, ‘Well done Paine’ (p. 109; E619), may well be a show of rapport for a personal friend (Prophet, p. 156), his response to the author of The Age of Reason is anything but unequivocal and he later declares that ‘Paine is either a Devil or an Inspired man’ (p. 3; E613). Blake’s letters and notebook entries make it clear that the problem of the friendly enemy was personal as well as political and artistic, and no more so than in the case of William Hayley. Tracing the philosophical legacy of Aristotle’s address, ‘O my friends, there is no friend’, Derrida turns his discussion to Blake’s short notebook poem, ‘To H——’: ‘Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake / Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake’ (E506). At stake here is a distinction we have seen before, between the semblance of friendship and forgiveness, that mimicry of


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humility and love, and honest friendship or true enmity – rather fittingly ‘To H——’ is followed by Blake’s complaint that ‘I write the Rascal Thanks till he & I / With Thanks & Compliments are quite drawn dry’ (‘On H——the Pick thank’; E506). Derrida remarks on this intertwining and exchange of the friend/ enemy in To H——: the declared enemy (Blake declares the enemy by ordering him to declare himself: be my enemy), the true enemy, is a better friend than the friend. For the enemy can hate or wage war on me in the name of friendship, for Friendships sake, out of friendship for friendship; if in sum he respects the true name of friendship, he will respect my own name. He will hear what my name should, even if it does not, properly name: the irreplaceable singularity which bears it, and to which the enemy then bears himself and refers. [. . .]. And if he desires my death, at least he desires it, perhaps, him, mine, singularly. The declared friend would not accomplish as much in simply declaring himself a friend while missing out on the name: that which imparts the name both to friendship and to singularity.8 The other declares itself honestly, disdaining the hypocrisy of the crawler, and in place of the mockery of love and forgiveness proffered by the unfaithful neighbour, it offers the insurmountable distance of the interminable stranger. The redemptive value of enmity lies in the declaration of difference, of an absolute alterity that validates the singular existence of the self, even – and perhaps especially – when it desires to put the self to death. ‘Death’, Derrida remarks elsewhere, ‘is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, “given,” one can say, by death.’9 Blake does not take things this far. He does, however, share the sense that what Derrida calls ‘a “superior” friendship’, a notion that seems to carry an inflection of the Blakean distinction between spiritual friends and corporeal enemies, depends on a mode of open hostility that both draws up battle lines to clearly delineate the self and at the same time fully commits itself to an active engagement with the other. I can love him as a beast & wish to beat him. In the following pages, I will suggest that Blake’s attacks on Locke are motivated in part by a commitment, shared with Locke, to mental liberty, to the primacy of experience and even to free enquiry over institutional authority and public opinion. What Blake objects to, it will be suggested,


are the narrow bounds within which Locke confines the understanding and the consequent barrier that this places between self and other. Otto presents a convincing argument that across Blake’s work the possibility of redemption, the opening to Eternity, is indissolubly bound to a relaxation, though not an erasure, of the boundary between self and other.10 He suggests that, across Blake’s texts, ideas of poetic or prophetic vision are derived from an ontological comportment constituted by an openness to alterity and a willingness to engage with the call of the other, be that God or other human beings. This reading is itself supported by recent research into Blake’s methods of composition, which suggests that his mode of artistic production and his comments on that process itself evince an awareness and an embrace of the alterity imposed by both language and the medium of illuminated printing. Blake’s invocation of various muses, his sense of the integrity and independence of the copper plates he engraved, his willingness to incorporate accident into his production process, as well as his awareness of language as something that is both internal and external all attest to his sense that the production of art is itself a dialogic process involving the artist’s engagement with an inspiring other.11 However, the openness to alterity that Blake associates with artistic production and personal redemption does not constitute a loss of identity, even if, in later works such as Milton and Jerusalem, it comes to entail the annihilation of certain modes of (Lockean) selfhood and even if fallen existence itself bears the marks of horrific violation. Indeed, even as Blake’s images of mental enslavement evoke what Williams calls a ‘protoconcept of ideology’, he holds fast to the integrity of a permanent and irreplaceable identity.12 ‘Each Identity is Eternal’, he will proclaim in The Description of the Last Judgement (p. 79; E556), and each identity is marked by the bounding line or outline: ‘Protogenes and Appelles knew each other by this line’ (Descriptive Catalogue, p. 64; E550). The willingness to actively engage the other in dialogue or mental war is not to be confused with the infiltration of self that hampers the expression of identity. And in this sense it is Locke’s proximity to Blake, his capacity to persuade with hypocritical and insidious reasoning, that fuels the hostility. ‘Locke’s virile contempt of slavery, his defense of toleration and even the primacy he gives to sense experience’, Frye notes, ‘are all Blakean qualities.’ He contrasts Locke with Hobbes, whose ‘honesty’ renders him harmless: it is the reasonable and persuasive Locke who is likely to attract a well-meaning audience, and it is far more important to attack him than Hobbes, who could be plausibly denounced by even a stupid or malicious person. (pp. 187–8)


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There is, I think, more to Hobbes’ honesty than Frye acknowledges, and likewise Blake’s sense of Locke’s hypocrisy was in certain respects more accurate than Frye admits. His contempt for (and investment in) slavery is ambiguous to say the least, he believed that the white race was superior and his epistemological arguments reinforced the dominance of the upper class as the only group who had sufficient time to cultivate their understanding fully.13 These ambiguities were widely remarked upon during Blake’s lifetime, adding further grounds to Blake’s sense of Locke’s knavery, exemplified by the ease with which he is taken up by out-and-out enemies such as Watson: ‘I believe that the Bishop laught at the Bible in his slieve & so did Locke’ (p. 2; E613). Blake seeks repeatedly to deny his Lockean inheritance, ‘To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering’ (Milton, 41.5; E142), for in late eighteenth-century Britain Locke threatens him from all sides. Ferber remarks on the ubiquity of Locke in Blake’s milieu, noting the ‘historical oddness’ of his antipathy: But odd it surely was in one who at least peripherally joined the circle around the bookseller Joseph Johnson, which included Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Dr. Price; who may have come from a Dissenting family himself; who was trained as an engraver by republican antiquarians and Miltonists; and who, as a London artisan, almost certainly knew and felt sympathy for radical reformist organizers like Hardy. (p. 14) Locke surrounds Blake as a dark force poised for invasion or an intellectual and spiritual contagion, much like the revolutionary fires that recoil on Albion’s Angel in America: The plagues creep on the burning winds driven by flames of Orc, And by the fierce Americans rushing together in the night Driven o’er the Guardians of Ireland and Scotland and Wales They spotted with plagues forsook the frontiers & their banners seard With fires of hell, deform their ancient heavens with shame & woe. Hid in caves the Bard of Albion felt the enormous plagues. (15.11–16; E57)


Blake himself becomes inflamed by certain strains of empirical epistemology, transmitted across generations by the spectre of Locke, champion of liberty and legislator of slavery, forefather of free-inquiry and guardian of divine mystery, advocate of toleration and mocker of enthusiasm. Blake rigorously polices the border between his territory and Locke’s, but despite all his self-professed contempt and abhorrence, as Hagstrum notes, ‘what he rejected in one of the mightiest efforts of his imagination had in fact invaded the deepest recesses of his being’ (p. 67). In a similar vein, Clark alludes to the radical Protestant heritage common to both Blake and Locke and he notes that ‘the power of the Lockean qualities of endeavour, self-discipline and achieved mastery of a recalcitrant world are foregrounded and massively enhanced [in Blake’s texts]’ (‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, p. 149). Glausser too notes that Blake and Locke shared a similarly radical stance, remarking ‘Locke was not just a theorist of sedition, but a seditious activist’ and ‘can be seen as a committed radical who disguised his authentic self in the face of enemy surveillance’ (p. 103). Blake’s contempt for Locke is related to their respective historical positions, which serve to highlight their philosophical differences while masking their similarities. Glausser qualifies his discussion of the radical political position shared by Locke and Blake with the remark that ‘Blake, of course, was challenging the curtailed monarchy put into place by Locke [. . .] in the seditious success of the Glorious Revolution’ (p. 92). Clark, meanwhile, proclaims that ‘unlike the ultimately impotent millenialists of the Commonwealth period, Locke was a successful revolutionary’, and suggests that while ‘the evidence is extremely slight that Blake had read Locke’s Two Treatises of Government’, Locke’s political views ‘had sufficiently widespread dissemination in the 1790s to appear in antithetical contexts: prominently cited by the defence in the Thomas Hardy treason trial, but bitterly denounced by Joseph Wright, follower of the prophet Richard Brothers’ (‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, pp. 134–5). What I want to suggest is that from a particular oppositional standpoint, Locke’s very success could be a mark of his failure. Although both Blake and Locke begin by occupying an oppositional stance to dominant cultural discourses, mutations in these discourses have served to alter Locke’s position. By the 1790s, Locke – or, more accurately, the memory of Locke, his spectral reincarnations – has begun to be appropriated by revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. Derrida’s discussion of Blake and the friendly enemy also touches upon what he suggests is their mutual respect for the spectre (a concept that he develops at length in his earlier work, Specters of Marx, where it


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appears as ‘not only the carnal apparition of the spirit, its phenomenal body, its fallen and guilty body’, but also as ‘the impatient and nostalgic waiting for a redemption, namely, once again, for a spirit’),14 and he quotes from Jerusalem, plate 6, as evidence of this (Politics, p. 73). Although Blake does not make an overt appearance in that earlier work, there are a number of parallels between Blake’s ‘spectre’ and Derrida’s, though there are significant differences as well. Unlike Derrida’s spectre, Blake’s spectre tends to represent a negative force, as opposed, for example, to Los, and Clark suggests that the concept is of ‘explicitly Lockean derivation’ (‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, p. 134). Though it certainly goes beyond merely signifying the problems Blake identified in Lockean philosophy, it does tend to embody only certain strands of Blake’s inheritance, in contrast to Derrida’s usage of the term which is not limited to particular thinkers or modes of thought. In any case, the term is almost entirely absent from Blake’s early work, occurring only four times in his poetry prior to The Four Zoas and a detailed discussion of the matter is beyond the scope of the present study.15 Of much greater relevance to the present discussion, however, are the nodes of connection between Derrida’s articulation of a ‘hauntology’ – of that which makes possible ‘ontology, theology, positive or negative onto-theology’ – and Blake’s attempts to bring about a redefinition and expansion of vision, which are in key respects more thoroughgoing than Derrida himself suggests (p. 51).16 Several of these intersections will be discussed below, but of particular relevance to the present discussion is the notion of cultural inheritance. Derrida notes the ‘radical and necessary heterogeneity’ of such an inheritance, which necessarily transforms reception into an exegetical act: one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inherit the same injunction. And inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause – natural or genetic. One always inherits from a secret – which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’ (p. 16; emphasis in original) The secrecy or uncertainties that adhere in the legacies of the past imbue the figureheads of those legacies and the progenitors of the inheritance, such as Locke, with an other-worldly or spectral status such that the act of remembering the ‘great thinkers’ of a bygone age is itself


a process of interpretative selection: ‘One never inherits without coming to terms with some specter, and therefore with more than one specter. With the fault but also the injunction of more than one’ (p. 21). Taking this notion of spectrality into account, it can be suggested that while Blake was acutely aware of the faults that could be perceived in the philosophies of intellectual forebears such as Locke, his emphasis on intellectual rigour as well as on the importance of experience indicate at least a partial fulfilment of Lockean injunctions. Moreover, Blake’s sustained hostility towards Locke may stem from the very multiplicity of this inheritance. As Clark notes (‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, p. 140), Paine and Watson invoke very different versions of Locke; they conjure, in Derrida’s terms, different spectres. The near omnipresence of Locke on both sides of doctrinal, political and philosophical conflicts lends credence to the suggestion that at the close of the eighteenth century, Locke, while far from being universally applauded, had acquired significant status as both an opponent and an ally. In his discussion of cultural inheritance, Benjamin notes that ‘all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them’ and he describes a ‘triumphal procession’ in which ‘cultural treasures’ are carried along as the ‘spoils’ of victory.17 Benjamin suggests that the contemplation of the origins of such objects ought to be accompanied by a sense of ‘horror’ due to the injustice associated with a process of privileging the labour of the few over the toil of the many. At fault here are not the objects of inheritance, but rather the process of inheritance as an act of selective memory. The great works of a civilisation, he remarks, ‘owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents of those who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries’ (ibid.). Like Benjamin’s idealised ‘historical materialist’, Blake ‘regards it as his task to brush history against the grain’ (ibid.). Locke’s spectre has become part of the march of the victors, his treatises are being carried along with the rest of the cultural treasures and it is the facile, unquestioning acceptance of this privileged position that raises Blake’s suspicions. Of especial concern for an artist such as Blake is the manner in which Locke’s philosophical tenets become incorporated into the aesthetic treatise of one of the most prominent opponents to revolution in the 1790s – Edmund Burke. It is precisely Locke’s absorption into the discourses put forth by Reynolds and Burke which Blake points to in the oft-quoted passage where he declares his contempt and abhorrence: Burke’s Treatise on the Sublime & Beautiful is founded on the Opinions of Newton & Locke on this Treatise Reynolds has grounded many of


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his assertions. [. . .] I read Burkes Treatise when very Young at the same time I read Locke on Human Understanding & Bacons Advancement of Learning [.. .]. I felt the Same Contempt & Abhorrence then; that I do now. They mock Inspiration & Vision Inspiration & Vision was then & now is [. . .] my Eternal Dwelling place. (Annotations to Reynolds, p. 244; E660–1) Although Blake makes these comments between 1801 and 1809,18 if we take him at his word, this antagonism is both continuous and longstanding. Moreover, he makes it clear that his opposition to Locke, Newton, Bacon, Burke and Reynolds centres on his own ideas of artistic production and perception, ‘Inspiration & Vision’. While ‘in defending The Age of Reason [. . .], Blake finds himself aligned with a person who admired Locke and to some extent resembled him’ (Glausser, p. 8), and while ‘it is clearly Blake, rather than Reynolds, whose ethic of “Mental Fight” is heir to Locke’s iconoclastic energy’ (Clark, ‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, p. 140), Locke’s posthumous return as a cultural icon at the heart of discourses that ‘mock’ his epistemological and ontological positions – his ‘Vision’ and ‘Eternal Dwelling place’ – makes him a fit recipient for Blake’s own iconoclastic lambasting. This response, which appropriates even as it condemns, can be seen as representative both of his reaction to the Enlightenment in general and of his historical position within a century of scientific discovery, which was not characterised by detached observation, but rather by an active perception that sought to transform science into a redemptive force, capable of exceeding the bounds of Lockean-style empiricism by increasing, rather than denying, the significance of perception and sensual existence. Blake’s intense concern over Locke’s position of authority – an authority so far-reaching that it is invoked by revolutionaries and reactionaries alike – is succinctly expressed in his earliest reference to Locke as ‘John Lookye’ in An Island in the Moon (p. 8; E456), written around 1784 (Bentley, Blake Books, pp. 221–3). It is Scopprell who makes the mistake, picking up Locke’s Essay and misreading both the title ‘An Easy of [Human] Understanding’ (ibid.) and the author’s name. The error is immediately pointed out – ‘John Locke said Obtuse Angle’ – but Scopprell gets it wrong again: ‘O O ay Lock’ (ibid.). Although these malapropisms work to satirise Scopprell’s pretensions to education, they also contain certain kernels of truth. Erdman glosses the change from ‘Human’ to ‘Huming’ in the title of Locke’s book as meaning ‘humming’ (E849); however, it could also refer to ‘Hume’, perhaps


alluding to Hume’s critique of experimental method. The initial rendering of ‘Locke’ as ‘Lookye’ would seem to suggest a representation of Locke as an authority figure deploying perception, and perhaps even a particular mode of vision, as a command: ‘Look ye’. Scopprell’s second attempt, ‘O ay Lock’, speaks to the corollary of authoritarian imposition, the imprisonment of the mind that will become a recurrent trope in Blake’s subsequent texts, which suggests that the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ in London (l.8; E27), the ‘chains [. . .] of weak and tame minds’ in The Marriage (16; E40), the ‘mental chains’ in America (13.3; E56) and the ‘chains of the mind’ in Urizen (10.25; E75) can all be traced back to Lockean epistemology. As will be suggested below, one of the major problems that Blake attributes to Locke’s models of the mind is the type of division that these draw between self and other. Through the figure of Urizen, Blake comes to connect such divisions with the self’s retreat from experience, but this suspicion of withdrawal is itself anticipated in the subsequent incident in An Island. Here Miss Gittipin interrupts the quasi-philosophical discussion of Scopprell and Obtuse Angle, criticising them for paying more attention to books than the people around them: Now here said Miss Gittipin I never saw such company in my life. you are always talking of your books I like to be where we talk.—you had better take a walk, that we may have some pleasure [.] (p. 8; E456) The withdrawal from human intercourse, the failing to ‘be where we talk’ can in fact be seen as a lighter, though no less serious, form of that ontological distancing which Blake comes to associate with Urizen’s fall from Eternity. ‘Lo, a shadow of horror is risen / In Eternity’, begins the speaker in Urizen in Chapter 1: [. . .] Some said ‘It is Urizen’, But unknown, abstracted Brooding secret, the dark power hid. (3.1, 5–7) Although Miss Gittipin’s apparent naiveté and preoccupation with gossip are laughable, we cannot simply dismiss her comments out of hand. The idea that a philosophical discussion can be seen as a withdrawal or an absence, a failing ‘to be where we talk’, seems to anticipate both Urizenic withdrawal and the retreat from perception that Blake warns


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against in his maxim that ‘We are led to Believe a Lie / When we see not Thro the Eye’ (‘Auguries of Innocence’, ll. 125–6; E492). Miss Gittipin is herself reproached by Mr Steelyard, whose name with its connotations of industrialism, whose occupation as a ‘Lawgiver’ (p. 45; E457) and whose behaviour as a ‘Saint’ (p. 47; E457) all contribute to a sense that his reproach may bear resemblance to a ‘kingly title’, if we remember Blake’s later remark on ‘the fools reproach’ (The Marriage, 9; E37). In any case, Scopprell leaps to her defence, declaring ‘I think the Ladies discourses Mr Steelyard are some of them more improving than any book’ (An Island, pp. 59–60; E457). Again, we find this emphasis on presence and on living discourse opposed to the dubious ‘improvement’ that can be offered by a book and again we find similar suspicions arising in Blake’s later works – in this instance in Urizen’s declaration: Here alone I in books formd of metals Have written the secrets of wisdom The secrets of dark contemplation [.] (Urizen, 4:24–6; E72) Again we find the connection between withdrawal and ‘dark contemplation’ together with an emphasis on ‘metals’. The connection here is not such as to indicate a direct link between Urizen and Steelyard, which seems unlikely given that the latter is widely held to represent Blake’s friend John Flaxman. However, while Urizen does not develop out of Steelyard’s character, the two do seem to share some of the same negative characteristics. Not only is Mr Steelyard a ‘law giver’ and a ‘Saint’, but in his tirade against Mrs Gittipin he praises the deference of boys as opposed to the ‘tongue’ of girls: A girl has always more tongue than a boy I have seen a little brat no higher than a nettle & she had as much tongue as a city clark but a boy would be such a fool not have any thing to say and if any body askd him a question he would put his head into a hole & hide it. (pp. 51–5; E457) ‘Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you’, Blake declares in The Marriage (8; E36), three years before he gave shape to Oothoon, his most noteworthy heroine and the first self-declared opponent of Urizenic philosophy.


Although Blake’s caricature of Flaxman may appear unexpectedly savage, it is in fact characteristic of the multiplicious, if not ambivalent, way in which he responds to friend and foe alike. Indeed, we need only recall the parallels between Urizen’s brass books and Blake’s copper plates, not to mention his self-parody in the form of Quid, to witness the application of his satirical gaze to objects closer to home. Obtuse Angle, who as Erdman notes may well be James Parker, Blake’s partner at the time (Prophet, p. 98), also embodies the impulse towards selfenclosure and intellectual blindness. Like Urizen on the title page to his book, Obtuse Angle finds that he too ‘always understood better when he shut his eyes’ (E450) and from the security of this darkened room he profoundly declares: In the first place it is of no use for a man to make Queries but to solve them, for a man may be a fool & make Queries but a man must have good sound sense to solve them. a query & an answer are as different as a strait line & a crooked one. (pp. 75–8; E450) Again we hear the reverberation of something to come, for one cannot read this passage without recalling Blake’s own declaration that ‘Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without / Improvement, are roads of Genius’ (The Marriage, 10; E38). Already in the early 1780s, Blake was evidently grappling with the Enlightenment ideas inherited by the polite culture within which he was then circulating. The recurrence of these themes throughout his subsequent works suggests that this process of assessing his enlightenment inheritance was a labour Blake engaged in until the end of his life. More specifically, the criticisms of Locke, biting in their opposition of the living present (which Locke privileges) to the knowledge codified in texts that withdraw the reader from the present (the effect of Locke’s text) and ambiguous in the location of this critique in the mouths of simpletons, suggest that even in 1784 Blake’s reactions to Locke were neither straightforward nor entirely antithetical.

Closet and cavern The epistemology that insists that ‘Genius is not Born. but Taught’, which Blake comes to attribute to Bacon (Annotations to Reynolds, p. 147; E656), is elaborated by Locke who rigorously denies the existence of any knowledge other than that which originates from the information imprinted on the mind through the senses or through reflection, itself


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a form of inward-looking perception.19 Although Locke does admit that new ideas can be generated by the reorganisation and reassessment of these ‘sensory ideas’, this process is secondary and depends upon the original sense-data, ‘the Materials and Foundations of the rest’ (Essay, §2.12.1). This rejection of innate ideas functions as an empowering move for Locke, who argues that the verification of principles and opinions must come from the rational activities of the individual rather than from an external source of authority. Locke insists that assent to a proposition ought to be given on the basis of its probability and he argues that the ‘firmest ground of Probability, is the conformity any thing has to our own Knowledge; especially that part of our Knowledge which we [. . .] continue to look on as Principles’ (§4.20.8). Furthermore, he gives the following warning: every one ought very carefully to beware what he admits for a Principle, to examine it strictly and see whether he certainly knows it to be true of it self by its own Evidence [. . .]. For he hath a strong bias put into his Understanding, which will unavoidably misguide his Assent, who hath imbibed wrong Principles, and has blindly given himself up to the Authority of any Opinion in it self not evidently true. (Ibid.) Nevertheless, Locke himself admits that under this model the mind acts as the passive recipient of external reality. ‘In bare naked Perception’, he writes, ‘the Mind is, for the most part, only passive; and what it perceives, it cannot avoid perceiving’ (§2.9.1). As Clark indicates, this initial passivity in Locke’s description of the act of thinking has led scholars such as Frye to describe the Lockean mind as passive and devoid of energy. However, as Clark points out, these criticisms fail to account for the active role Locke attributes to – and indeed demands from – later mental activities. Locke argues that despite the mind’s passivity in the reception of sensory data, ‘it exerts several acts of its own, whereby out of its simple Ideas [. . .] the other [thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, and willing] are framed’ (§2.12.1). The recognition of the dynamic elements of Lockean psychology allows Clark to describe Locke’s ‘analytic reduction’ of ideas to something analogous to physical particles as the ‘radical and thorough-going’ application of Blake’s declaration that ‘To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit’ (‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, pp. 136–7; E641). If Clark is correct, it is Locke, not Blake, who best puts the latter’s principles into active use. However, Clark’s implied pun on ‘Particular’, ‘Particularize’ and ‘Particle’ runs the risk of obscuring the fundamental division between Lockean


and Blakean psychology. Locke’s mental particles are stable entities that originate beyond the limits of the human mind; Blake’s are not. For Locke, the building blocks of mental reality are imported – or more accurately, translated – from the outside world. What’s more, these mental particles retain the same autonomy as their external counterparts. Locke argues that ‘the Materials in both [the mental and physical world] being such as he has no power over, either to make or destroy, all that Man can do is either to unite them together, or to set them by one another, or wholly separate them’ (§2.12.1). Thus, man becomes disengaged from his ideas, just as he is from his environment, for both originate and exist beyond the bounds of his control. Taylor notes that ‘not only Locke’s epistemology but his radical disengagement and reification of human psychology were immensely influential in the Enlightenment’ (p. 173). In the name of granting individuals the ability to remake themselves, Locke’s method of self-examination prescribes a radical-reflexivity that – seemingly paradoxically – is bound to an objectification of the mind. As Taylor reports, ‘the modern ideal of disengagement requires a reflexive stance’ because ‘we have to turn inward and become aware of our own activity and of the processes which form us’ (p. 174). We must turn inwards, away from the objects of sense and focus on what we can know with certainty – the objects and activities of our own minds. However, lest our own pre-formed habits and desires mislead us, we must objectify our minds and consider them dispassionately. Taylor cites Descartes as the forerunner in this tradition of disengagement, but his discussion also focuses on Locke, and it is at Locke’s feet that Taylor lays the ‘punctual self’, whose highest achievement is not only a disengagement from inherited cultural beliefs and principles, but also ‘the disengagement both from the activities of thought and from our unreflecting desires’ (p. 171). For Locke such self-objectification depends in part upon the representation of the mind, by metaphor and analogy, as being constructed out of things such as atoms and blocks. Moreover, it involves explaining mental processes according to mechanical principles, mapping the mind onto the operations of the Newtonian universe. To this extent, Locke’s punctual self operates as a precursor to the sorts of physiologically grounded psychology practised by later thinkers such as Hartley and Priestley. However, this line of inheritance cannot be translated into proof of Locke’s own materialism. Despite the fact that his reification of the mind functions as a precursor for later materialistic models, Locke represents the punctual self as completely divorced from material existence. As Taylor notes:


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this self which emerges from the objectification of and separation from our given nature cannot be identified with anything in this given. It can’t be easily conceived as just another piece of the natural world. [. . .]. The punctual agent seems to be nothing else but a ‘self’, an ‘I’. (p. 175) In this conception of the punctual self as something entirely removed from the visible world, we seem to be approaching the ‘abominable void’ that marks the invisible appearance of Urizen (3.4; E70). Taylor describes this model of the self as ‘one of the great paradoxes of modern philosophy’, for the reification of the mind is concomitant with the adoption of an uncompromisingly self-reflexive stance and, hence, ‘radical objectivity is only intelligible and accessible through radical subjectivity’ (pp. 175–6). Thus, the self must be examined from the inside, but the examiner must insert a distance between himself and the object under consideration, even though in this case they are one and the same being. This divisive aspect of rational perception – that which allows for the separation of the thing from its appearance – is central to Locke’s notion of external as well as internal knowledge, creating a model of knowledge in which external objects are known only through internal ideas. Locke distinguishes between the ‘Ideas or Perceptions in our Minds’ and the ‘modifications of matter in the Bodies that cause such Perceptions in us’, noting that in the majority of cases our idea of an external object bears no more likeness to objects in themselves ‘than the Names, that stand for them, are the likeness of our Ideas, which yet upon hearing, they are apt to excite in us’ (Essay, §2.8.7). The comparison between sensation and verbal communication emphasises the split between the idea of a thing and the thing itself. Immediately after he has drawn this comparison, Locke diligently distinguishes between the ‘Idea’, which he defines as ‘whatsoever the Mind perceives in it self, or is the immediate object of Perception, Thought, or Understanding’, and the ‘Quality of the Subject’, defined as ‘the Power to produce any Idea in our mind’ (§2.8.8). Though these definitions further clarify the division between the idea and that which it represents, Locke proceeds to make a characteristic qualification of his position, attempting to present a stable ground for knowledge whilst retaining his dual emphasis on uncertainty and the limitations of the senses. Taking the process of division one step further, he separates the qualities into those that are primary (solidity, extension, figure, texture, motion or rest, and number) and those that are


secondary (colours, smells, sounds, tastes, etc.). The former are those qualities that ‘are utterly inseparable from the Body, in what estate soever it be’ and the latter are qualities ‘which in truth are nothing in the Objects themselves, but Powers to produce various Sensations in us by their primary Qualities’ (§2.8.9, 10). On one level, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities functions as an explanation of the process of sensation and Locke enjoins us to suppose that the secondary qualities are produced through the primary qualities of tiny bodies, such that ‘a Violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter of peculiar figures, and bulks, and in different degrees and modifications of their Motions, causes the Ideas of the blue Colour, and sweet Scent of that Flower to be produced in our Minds’ (§2.8.13). However, despite the limitations that this explanation places on perception, reducing the greater portion of sensory experience to arbitrary representations that ‘are in truth nothing in the Objects themselves’ (§2.8.14), it is underpinned by a faith in the knowability of primary qualities. On another level, therefore, Locke’s account of sensation serves to reintroduce an aspect of reliability, of a physical connection between the ideas and the particular motions that produce them: The Bulk, Figure, Number, Situation, and Motion, or Rest of their solid Parts; those are in them, whether we perceive them or no; and when they are of that size, that we can discover them, we have by these an Idea of the thing, as it is in it self. (§2.8.23) The crux here is the notion of ‘discovery’, for it is only when an object can be clearly perceived that the mind can begin to conceive the thing as it is in itself. At this juncture, between the primary and the secondary qualities, Locke’s system is pulled in opposite directions, on the one hand, refusing to forsake the notion of a correlation between the ideas of an immaterial mind and the material objects in the external world (united in the ideas of primary qualities) and, on the other, insisting that such perception is beyond human capacity: For our Senses failing us, in the discovery of the Bulk, Texture, and Figure of the minute parts of Bodies, on which their real Constitutions and Differences depend, we are fain to make use of their secondary Qualities, as the characteristical Notes and Marks, whereby to frame Ideas of them in our Minds, and distinguish them one from another. (§2.23.8)


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Again the notion of a direct correlation between ideas and qualities is supplanted by a system of imperfect and arbitrary representation, ‘as the characteristical Notes and Marks’. Notably, Locke represents the division between the external world of objects and the internal world of ideas through the metaphor of a closet or dark room: For, methinks, the Understanding is not much unlike a Closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible Resemblances, or Ideas of things without. (Essay, §2.11.17) Otto suggests that this ‘closeted man’ is a precursor of Blake’s own ‘cavern’d man’, noting that ‘within the closet the other is perceived as “an external visible resemblance”’ and ‘reason manipulates these resemblances as if they were fixed coins or tokens’ (Constructive Vision, p. 17). By glossing Locke in this way, Otto emphasises the economic aspects of Locke’s model of the self, in which ‘there is certainly no room for dialogue, or for the relationship between call [of the other] and response [of the self] that is the ground of [Blake’s] Eternity’ (ibid.). As an ardent dualist and empiricist, Locke adamantly believes in the incarnation of the spirit within the body, but this incarnation manifests itself as an incarceration since the visible resemblance of an external body is not the same thing as the body itself. Thus, the world and everyone in it are represented to us as nothing other than perceived appearances, and these ideas are the property of a self that is, in Taylor’s words, ‘extra-worldly’ (p. 175). Locke’s philosophy reduces man to a ‘cavern’ in which God becomes invisible and the world is externalised and cloaked in the veil of sensory ideas. Frosch notes that in Blake’s view the dichotomisation of the spiritual and the material represent ‘the twin antipodes of the fall’: It follows that Blake is not interested in any God, paradise, or fulfilment which is unavailable to the immediate experience of the body. The withdrawal from direct perception as a trusted mode of cognition— the path carved out for us by Plato, Paul, and Descartes—produces a fatal gap between the real and the perceived, as does the empirical subordination of sensory detail to mental pattern; and when what we take to be ultimate reality is removed from the world of appearances, so too is paradise, which is the state of our complete involvement in that reality.20


Blake’s avowal that ‘man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’ (14; E39) speaks to the imposition of a barrier which, at its most extreme, prohibits any sort of meaningful interaction between self and other. Colebrook notes that the ‘gesture of enlightenment’ involves the removal of ‘all those ghosts, images and illusions that haunt thinking and rob it of its own autonomous selfproduction’ (p. 21), and this is precisely the sort of empowerment that Locke’s Essay promises. However, what the philosophy of five senses actually does is to exchange one set of illusions for another, trading tradition, opinion and a faith in innate knowledge for a set of metaphysical assumptions that actually foreclose on the possibility of moving beyond the appearances that represent the known world to the understanding. Colebrook’s analysis does not examine Blake’s relationship with Locke specifically, but there are parallels here between his role as the progenitor of caverned man and the ‘priests of metaphysics’ who in claiming to know the ‘Idea of that which lies beyond experience’ actually render it ‘spectral’, reducing and limiting it to one figure among an infinite number of possibilities (p. 20). Notably, the illusion Locke offers is an image not of the unthinkable other, but of the self understood in a particular way. The reified mind becomes, in Locke’s speculation on personal identity, divorced from the corporeal world altogether: Thus the Limbs of his Body is to every one a part of himself: He sympathizes and is concerned for them. Cut off an hand, and thereby separate it from that consciousness, we had of its Heat, Cold, and other Affections; and it is then no longer a part of that which is himself, any more than the remotest part of Matter. (§2.27.11) And as for the limb, so too for the whole of the body, for by reducing personal identity to the consistency of a consciousness delineated by recollection, Locke, as Ricoeur remarks, invents ‘a criterion of identity, namely mental identity, to which may henceforth be opposed the criterion of corporeal identity’ (p. 126). When Blake declares that ‘The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire is true’ (14; E39), he is not suggesting that the spirit will triumph through the annihilation of the material world, for unlike Locke he does not regard the body as a garment that can be changed or discarded (Essay, §2.27.10). Blake insists that apocalyptic consumption will occur through an ‘improvement’, rather than an annihilation, ‘of sensual enjoyment’, a process that is initiated by Blake’s very physical act of ‘printing in the infernal [or illuminated] method [. . .] melting


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apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid’ (14; E39). As Viscomi notes, ‘in this process, the relation between “surface” and “infinite” is not analogous to that between body and soul’, for ‘the key word is “apparent” and not surface; remove what appears to be true to see what is really true’.21 With regard to the caves and caverns in The Marriage, Viscomi points out that these ‘come in two states, open and closed, representing either limited or [. . .] illimitable perception’ (p. 36). Hence, while the cave can represent restriction, it can also operate as Hell’s emblem and, as on plate 11, can appear ‘anti-Platonic, with reality residing in and within the cave rather than outside and transcendent’ (pp. 35–6). While Hell’s fires and its caverns are capable of sustaining contrary meanings, these are contingent upon the perspective of the viewer. To the Angels, ‘the fires of hell [. . .] look like torment and insanity’ (The Marriage, 6; E35) – a perspective consistent with the belief that fire is painful, damaging and destructive to the corporeal. But from the Devils’ perspectives, these fires are filled ‘with the enjoyments of Genius’ (ibid.) and Blake tells us that, far from destroying the body, they are from the body and are ‘salutary and medicinal’ (14; E39). Likewise, from the perspective of caverned man, the cave is always already a symbol of confinement, for it represents the enclosure of space within solid, impenetrable matter; but this incarceration is at least partially self-imposed – ‘man has closed himself up’ (ibid.; emphasis added). The inheritance of Lockean epistemology, Blake will suggest in texts such as ‘The Human Abstract’ and Ahania, is corporeal – one might almost say genetic – as well as mental and it involves a transformation of existence in accordance with the onto-theology hidden inside the philosophy of the five senses. But, if creation is ‘always inherited, material, opaque and non-autonomous’ (Colebrook, p. 14), it is also a matter of choice, the result of an originary decision that, though it cannot be undone, has the potential to be made again with arrival of every new opportunity to act. ‘Who can act or perform as if each work or action were the first, the last, and the only one in his life, is great in his sphere’, Lavater writes with Blake both marking his approval and strengthening the force of the aphorism by deleting the final three words (Aphorisms, §272; E589).22 If perception is restricted to peering through the cave’s ‘narrow chinks’ (14; E39), it indeed appears that the world beyond the cavern is out of bounds; however, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing’, including the cave walls, ‘would appear to man as it is: infinite’ (ibid.). This change in perspective does not mean that for caverned man the wall of his cave is any less impenetrable, but the quality of impenetrability is imposed upon the body


by his circumscribed perceptions, rather than inhering in the body itself. The transcendentalist, immaterialist or abstract metaphysician is trapped by the very ontology that structures the dream of escape, representing the corporeal as a hellish place from which the good and obedient will one day be freed. But, the Blakean ‘I’, who walks ‘among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius’ (The Marriage, 7; E35), realises that the journey through time and space is itself structured by the manner in which one navigates various ‘impositions’ from within and without. One finds antecedents for the type of ontology Blake seems to be imagining in the seventeenth-century philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza. The model of personal identity as mental identity (as opposed to corporeal identity), which Blake rejects in Locke is unthinkable within Spinoza’s system, for mind and body are two attributes of the same substance and therefore ‘a man does not know himself except through affections of his body and their ideas’.23 Spinoza’s advocacy of parallelism, as Deleuze remarks, ‘does not consist merely in denying any real causality between the mind and the body, it disallows any primacy of the one over the other’.24 Indeed, in a move that accords well with Blake’s comments on the matter, Spinoza proposes not only that ‘the mind and the body, are one and the same individual’, but also that ‘the mind does not know itself, except insofar as it perceives the ideas of the affections of the body’ (2.P23, P21). Moreover, Spinoza’s statements on the nature of substance – that there can only be one substance, God, and that it consists ‘of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence’ – and on the relationship between God and existence, ‘whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God’, sound very similar to Blake’s descriptions of the Poetic Genius in All Religions (Ethics, 1.P15, P10). However, Ethics’ categorical dismissal of any move towards anthropomorphism directly contradicts Blake’s unequivocal and frequent statements concerning God’s humanity, while their adherence to a geometric model would not, we can safely assume, have been well received by Blake. Nevertheless, a pursuit of the intersections and overlaps between Spinoza’s thought and Blake’s can be expected to bear much fruit, and his name will crop up again throughout subsequent chapters.

Priestley and the material soul Johnson notes that throughout the eighteenth century scientists and philosophers engaged in fierce debates over the constituent elements of


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the material universe, with discussion focusing on the question of the relationship between matter and energy.25 Priestley’s view is particularly significant due to the congeniality of many of his ideas with Blake’s, not the least of which is his formulation of a system of materialism that, in uniting the spiritual and the physical, is capable of rescuing Christianity from the transcendentalism imposed upon it by pagan philosophers. The probability that Blake would have found certain elements in Priestley’s system of materialism congenial was first mooted by Paley, who remarks that ‘Priestley’s denial of the dichotomy of soul and body and his claim that energy could be an attribute of body are very close to the ones expressed by Blake’s “voice of the Devil” ’.26 Paley proceeds to compare relevant passages from Priestley’s Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit with the first two counterpropositions presented by the Devil on plate 4 of The Marriage: I Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. (E34; cited in Paley, p. 9) Paley remarks that ‘we should not be misled by Priestley’s professed materialism and Blake’s hostility to materialist philosophies’ and he notes that ‘the natural world, according to Priestley, is composed of God’s energy’ (ibid.), a view that Blake seems to have shared, though he distrusts the idea of the ‘natural’ when it appears in isolation from, or in opposition to, the spirit. Although Blake’s personal acquaintance with Priestley and familiarity with his texts remains a matter of some speculation, they were both closely associated with Joseph Johnson and they shared philosophical, theological and political allegiances. Moreover, Blake’s apparent familiarity with Priestley’s ideas has been widely noted by generations of Blake scholars such as Mee, who notes that ‘Priestley may well have been a direct source’ for plate 4 of The Marriage and was at the very least ‘an important if more diffuse general influence’ (Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 138).27 Perhaps the earliest example of such influence appears in An Island, embodied in the character ‘Inflammable Gas’. While Damon suggests that the character was directly inspired by Priestley, this conjecture now seems unlikely (p. 197).28 Rodney and Mary Baine point out that ‘since Priestley was twenty-four years older than Blake, was eminent in his profession, and lived in Birmingham from 1780 to 1791,


he does not fit into the picture at all’. Instead, they suggest William Nicholson as the source of the caricature; however, Nicholson himself provides yet another link with Priestley and his system of materialism, as he summarises Priestley’s views in his own Introduction to Natural Philosophy.29 Despite widespread acknowledgement of Priestley’s potential impact on Blake’s work, a number of important parallels remain unexplored. Like Blake, Priestley considers natural philosophy and theology to be intricately intertwined. In particular, he traces the dichotomisation of body and spirit to pagan corruptions of true Christian religion, arguing that not only does the Bible present man as a homogeneous being, but also Christianity can only be understood correctly when viewed from a materialistic perspective. ‘By the help of the system of materialism’, Priestley writes, ‘the christian removes the very foundation of many doctrines, which have exceedingly debased and corrupted christianity’.30 He maintains that the ‘heterogeneous mixture’ of paganism, which denies the homogeneity of man, corrupts Christianity by introducing the idea of a separate, immaterial soul. The manner in which Priestley’s rejection of the separate soul functions as a repudiation of transcendentalism becomes clearer in his discussion of the place of God in his system of materialism: Certainly this idea is much more consonant to the idea which the sacred writers give us of the omnipresence of the divine Being, and of his filling all in all, than that of a being who bears no relation to space, and therefore cannot properly be said to exist any where; which is the doctrine of the rigid immaterialists. (p. 112) Thus, rather than ending up with a mechanical system from which the creator is withdrawn, Priestley interweaves the experimental with the exegetical to produce a conceptualisation of the deity as an entity infused throughout and supporting existence. This representation of God is contingent upon the depiction of spirit as having extension, a property which the dualists not only attribute to matter (as distinct from spirit), but also list as one of its defining properties. It is the removal of extension from the spirit that necessitates the removal of the deity from the universe and the construction of apocalypse as a transcendence of the material. Immaterialism, Priestley argues, is unscriptural for several reasons. First, in the scriptures themselves, ‘the circumstances which attended the giving of the law [. . .] could not leave upon it the idea of an immaterial


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being, but of a being capable of local presence’ (Disquisitions, p. 139). Similarly, ‘an audible voice is certainly calculated to give us the idea of a locally present being, and this is frequently represented as proceeding immediately from God’ (p. 140). This localised presence is consonant with the presentation of the deity as ‘constantly supporting, and at pleasure controlling the laws of nature’, and is reinforced both by the signification of his presence by visible symbols and by the representation of him as ‘residing in the heavens’ (p. 113). Priestley admits that such representations may not be ‘philosophically just’ but insists that, first, they are made out of ‘condescension [. . .] to the weaknesses of human apprehension’ and, secondly, that they provide ‘an easy, and a very innocent manner of conceiving concerning God’ (ibid.). This philosophical injustice is ‘innocent’ because it is calculated to produce an idea of the deity that does not participate in the dualists’ contradictory assertion that omnipresence refers to God’s ‘power of acting every where, though he exists no where’ (p. 54). On the other hand, immaterialism is doubly erroneous as it contradicts the precepts of both scripture and reason. Priestley attacks the doctrine of the immateriality of spirit on the grounds that it is a logical impossibility concealed by the notion of divine mystery – a concept that corrupts Christianity and subjects the vulgar to the guile of priestcraft. Significantly, he represents the imposition of this error as an oppression of the imagination. ‘Let a man torture his imagination as much as he pleases’, he writes, ‘I will pronounce it to be impossible for him to conceive even the possibility of mutual action without some common property’ (p. 61). The figure of religious mystery imposing upon and torturing imagination immediately brings to mind Blake’s own descriptions of the tyranny of Reason and the subjugation of the imagination or Poetic Genius: ‘Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling’ (The Marriage, 5; E34). The affinities between Priestley and Blake become still more overt in Corruptions. In a discussion that accords well with Blake’s later declaration, in the preface to Milton (1; E95), that the Greeks and Romans stole and perverted the teachings of the Bible, Corruptions describes a process in which Christianity was infiltrated by pagan beliefs and assimilated into the metaphysical system of the neo-Platonists. Priestley argues that the application of Plato’s doctrine of Logos – ‘that very system [. . .], which made Christ to have been the eternal reason’ – signified the first corruption of Christianity.31 Notably, Priestley reports – in a manner reminiscent of his privileging of the vulgar belief in a localised deity – that ‘the doctrine of the divinity of Christ did not establish itself without much opposition,


especially from the unlearned among the Christians, who thought that it savoured of Polytheism, that it was introduced by those who had had a philosophical education’ (p. 19). Priestley is adamant that the Bible does not speak of souls as separate from bodies, insisting that the erroneous interpretation stems from an exegetical error that occurred after the time of John. Such interpretative errors have had profound effects on church doctrine, dragging in their wake the twin heresies of atonement and mystery (Corruptions, pp. 51, 141). Although the Bible does refer to Christ as a sacrifice, Priestley insists that this is figurative language and he argues that Christ is no more the archetype towards which the Jewish sin-offerings alluded than he is a high-priest – a title which the Bible also applies to Christ in what must, according to Priestley’s opposition between Christ and priestcraft, be a strictly figurative sense. Priestley enables himself to make this argument by insisting that a correct understanding of Christ’s life and death ‘seems to be not so much what we may expect to find in any particular texts [. . .], as what is suggested by a view of the history itself’ (Disquisitions, p. 57). And this historical overview suggests that Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection were intended as an example of the sort of immortality which Christians can expect. Given that Christ was entirely human, when he died he died completely, and his resurrection was a demonstration of the manner in which God will bring the dead (who are dead in both body and soul) back to life by reorganising the particles of their bodies which have dissipated during post-mortal decay (Disquisitions, pp. 156–7). As Priestley well knew, this argument had been made in the preceding century by Hobbes, who insists on a literal reading of the Gospels, arguing, as Priestley would a century later, that Christ’s pledge concerns ‘the Resurrection of the Body’, for immortality is a condition granted ‘not by a property consequent to the essence, and nature of mankind; but by the will of God’.32 The body is central in the eschatological thinking of these two materialists, appearing as an emblem of the power of divinity to transgress the laws of nature in a radical alteration of existence. In their perception of an emotive and redemptive power in the materiality of Christ’s physical form and in the very human mark of its mortality, no less than in their irreducible faith in Christ’s promise, Hobbes and Priestley come remarkably close to territory delineated not only by Blake’s Marriage, but also – as we will see – to the beliefs and practices of his more enthusiastic forebears. The injunction that compels Priestley to read Christ’s title of ‘high Priest’ as figurative in the same way as the description of him as a ‘sacrifice’ arises from a larger distrust of priestly power. Priestley represents the


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Priesthood as originating in the formation of a religious elite which continues to sustain itself by appealing to the idea of divine mystery and which has evolved from a concept designed to justify the exclusion of laypeople into a disguise for the contradictions of a corrupt Christianity: By the term mystery was meant, originally, the more secret parts of the heathen worship, to which select persons only were admitted, and those under an oath of secrecy. Those mysteries were also called initiations: those who were initiated were supposed to be pure and holy, while those who were not initiated were considered as impure and profane. (p. 141) It goes without saying that those excluded from this secret were the ‘vulgar’ and the ‘unlearned’ whose common sense ideas – of Christ as a man, of God as localised and present, and of the soul as a perceivable substance – caused them to resist the very impossibilities which that ‘mystery’ came to conceal. Thus, Priestley is able to present himself at the forefront of a more egalitarian Christianity, penetrating the mystery, revealing its impossibility and replacing it with the totally scriptural and entirely reasonable conceptualisation of man as ‘an homogeneous being’ (Corruptions, p. 140). His has become the voice of vulgar understanding as much as rigorous rationality, of common sense as well as experimental method, and his discourse is not only philosophical but redemptive, for ‘when [. . .] we shall acquiesce in the opinion that man is an homogeneous being [. . .], the whole fabric of superstition, which had been built upon the doctrine of a soul and of its separate conscious state, must fall at once’ (ibid.). In this sense, the spirit of ‘free inquiry’ which guides his Disquisitions works ‘to overturn the antichristian systems that have been permitted by divine providence to prevail so long [. . .] and consequently (though probably in a remote period) the antichristian tyrannies that have supported them’ (p. ix). Priestley very much represents himself as part of a larger, English tradition of liberated philosophy – a philosophy freed from both the rational circularity of the schoolmen and the irrational superstitions of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches – and it is no surprise that he invokes the name of that other infamous materialist and advocate of common sense, Thomas Hobbes. In his depiction of himself as daring to challenge the mistaken prejudices of his age, he declares ‘like Mr. Hobbes, I may for generations lie under the imputation of absolute atheism’ (p. xvi). That Blake would have similarly rejoiced in this spirit of intellectual liberty and rebellion goes without saying, and


from this perspective his own attacks on Locke can be seen as continuing the intellectual war against oppression and superstition which Locke helped to initiate. Despite his endless tirades against enlightenment philosophy and rational religion, we cannot doubt that in this mental battle Blake would have been inclined to forge alliances with Priestley similar to those he formed with Paine – welcoming but wary, ready to accept their promotion of liberty without subscribing to all of their doctrines.33

2 The Tree of Mystery

Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody Poor: And Mercy no more could be, If all were as happy as we; And mutual fear brings peace; Till the selfish loves increase. Then Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care. He sits down with holy fears, And waters the ground with tears: Then Humility takes its root Underneath his foot. Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head; And the Catterpiller and Fly, Feed on the Mystery. And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat; And the Raven his nest has made In its thickest shade. The Gods of the earth and sea, Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain – ‘The Human Abstract’, Songs of Innocence and Experience (E27) 41


‘The Human Abstract’, one of two companion pieces to ‘The Divine Image’ from Songs of Innocence, begins by describing a moral condition in which the performance of morality depends upon systems of impoverishment and inequity, pity requires forced deprivation and mercy can only exist as long as there is suffering in the world. The first stanza consists of two couplets, in which the first lines name a Christian virtue and indicate its contingency upon the anti-Christian condition stated in the second. It ends with a semicolon after the final ‘we’, which suggests that the second stanza will continue in the same spirit as the first, describing the paradoxical position of morality in lapsarian existence. At first glance, this seems to be the case, for line 1, stanza 2 reads: ‘And mutual fear brings peace’ (l.5; E27). The conjunction ‘And’ suggests that this couplet will provide a third instance of virtue depending upon vice. The couplet does in fact do this, but it deviates from the couplets in stanza 1 by condensing its moral paradox into the first line. It does this by describing a paradoxical activity – ‘mutual fear brings peace’ – rather than presenting a contingent virtue followed by the condition upon which it paradoxically depends. Line 2, stanza 2, introduces a temporal element to the poem – beginning with the conjunction ‘Till’, rather than with ‘If’ or ‘And’ – and from this point onwards, the poem ceases to state conditions, but rather occupies itself with the provision of a narrative. After ‘the selfish loves increase’, ‘Cruelty’ – possibly their product or progeny – creates a trap, then ‘with holy fears’, which may be the same as the mutual fear in stanza 2, ‘waters the ground with tears’ that allow ‘Humility’ to take root. From this root spreads ‘the dismal shade / Of Mystery’, which will provide food for ‘the Catterpiller and Fly’, will bear ‘the fruit of Deceit’ and will provide a home for the Raven. This tree, whose roots are humility and boughs are mystery, is an early description of the ‘Tree of Mystery’ that will reappear in Ahania. There we are told that the Tree’s growth is driven by the composition of Urizen’s ‘book of iron’ and it functions as a conflation of the tree of knowledge and the cross upon which Christ was crucified, with the latter all but stripped of its messianic potential as Urizen’s crucifixion of his ‘first begotten’ forges a link between the doctrines of mystery and atonement, thus parodying the twin heresies that Priestley traces to the impact of paganism on the early church (Ahania, 3.64, 4.5; E86; Priestley, Corruptions, p. 51). Although ‘The Human Abstract’ does not present itself as a narrative of the fall in quite the same way as Ahania, parodying specific ‘virtues’ rather than church doctrines and biblical texts, the poem’s ominous tone combined with

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the image of the tree and its fruit are enough to suggest that the story related in stanzas 2–5 also represents a narrative of Fall that perpetuates and perhaps even accentuates the moral or amoral condition of iniquity described by the first stanza. In the final stanza, however, we are told that the tree of mystery is not something external, but instead ‘grows’ inside ‘the Human Brain’. The use of the present tense here appears to differ from that in the preceding stanzas in that it does not suggest an action occurring within the narrative, but rather describes a timeless or universal state. Moreover, the fact that this ‘growth’ is the same process as that described by the narrative indicates that the story is itself occurring in the timeless present, that it is a series of events involved in ceaseless repetition. This use of the timeless present brings us back to the first stanza because the universalising tone of its claims about Pity and Mercy already suggests that the speaker sees his discourse as timeless and suggests that the fall both results from and creates the condition of iniquity presented in stanza 1. On the one hand, this represents a logical impossibility, but on the other it is presented as a grim reality that cannot be rectified by turning to external nature. This use of the timeless present thus disrupts the organising principles of sequence and causality, producing an effect that generates its own cause. In this way, the poem problematises a fundamental element in Priestley’s work, the belief in cause and effect, at the same time providing a powerfully condensed version of ecclesiastical history congenial to Priestley’s own critique of state religion. The similarities between the representations of Mystery put forward by Blake and by Priestley are further apparent if ‘The Human Abstract’ is read in the context of The Marriage, printed four years prior to the printing of Experience. Just as Priestley describes mystery as a means for sustaining priestly power, so Blake’s ‘Catterpiller’, who in The Marriage is like the priest in choosing ‘the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on’ (9; E37), feeds ‘on the Mystery’ (‘The Human Abstract’, l.16; E27); and just as Priestley’s priests follow their heathen predecessors into the ‘secret parts of [. . .] worship’ (Corruptions, p. 141), so too the Raven, who in ‘A Song of Liberty’ is called ‘tyrant’ and has ‘Priests [. . .] in deadly black’ (27; E45), makes his nest in mystery’s ‘thickest shade’ (‘The Human Abstract’, l.20; E27). Moreover, in making ‘Humility’ the root of Mystery, Blake, like Priestley, recognises a link between exclusivity, priesthood and the humility of the excluded: by rendering humility a virtue, the priest consolidates his power within a hierarchy structured by an incremental accumulation of mystery – the mysteriousness of disembodied reason and an invisible God’s obscure will.


Obscurity and the sublime The connection between obscurity and holy fear had, by Blake’s time, already been firmly established by Edmund Burke, who explicitly connects the impediment of vision with both religious awe and political tyranny: To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. [. . .]. Those despotic governments, which are founded [. . .] principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark.1 Although in this passage, Burke attributes the use of mystery to ‘despotic governments’ and ‘heathen’ religion, in Reflections on the Revolution in France he proceeds to argue that mystery and ‘pleasing illusions’ in government are both necessary and beneficial, rendering ‘power gentle, and obedience liberal’. Confronting his audience with the humiliating image of ‘our naked shivering nature’, exposed to ‘the new conquering empire of light and reason’, Burke deploys what Whale describes as ‘an alternative politics of seeing’ in which vision itself – its modes and its objects – becomes a matter of choice to ‘the privileged subject of a refined culture’.2 Though Burke’s politics change considerably during the three decades between the publication of Enquiry and Reflections, his sense of the political implications of perception and aesthetics stretch back to the earlier work, where he insists that despite reflection on the wisdom, justice and goodness of the Christian deity, ‘no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand’ (§2.5, p. 68). Burke is here treading quite comfortably on territory delineated by the ‘humility’ and ‘holy fears’ which Blake’s poetry rejects on aesthetic and political grounds. Not only does Burke glorify the limited perception of fallen humanity, but by 1790 at the latest he does so with a full knowledge of the ways that his system of aesthetics could be used to reinforce an aristocratic power base. Not only did Blake oppose Burke’s Reflections, but he would also have been well aware of Burke’s own aristocratic lineage and he is uncompromising in his rejection of the Burkean sublime: ‘Obscurity is Neither the Source of the Sublime nor of any Thing Else’, he declares in response to Reynolds’ reiteration of Burke’s theory (p. 194; E658).3 Blake’s thoughts on the sublime are themselves deeply involved in a wider tradition of enlightenment empiricism in which obscurity figures

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as a constituent feature of the divine. When Burke praises Milton for not forgetting ‘the obscurity which surrounds the most incomprehensible of beings’ (Enquiry, 2.14, p. 80), he is situating himself within a Lockean tradition that emphasises the inscrutability of the divine. As Jordan notes, ‘the “authority” upon which Burke ultimately draws for the experience of the sublime is the Christian deity, a source which is invisible and inaccesible to empirical investigation’.4 Despite Locke’s emphasis on clarity of thought and expression, which Blake himself invokes in his refutation of Watson (Clark, ‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, p. 134), he repeatedly shrouds the divine in the cover of impenetrable mystery. Although we can in theory arrive at the complex idea of God ‘by enlarging those simple Ideas, we have taken from the Operations of our own Minds, by Reflection; or by our Senses [. . .] to that vastness, to which Infinity can extend them’, Locke insists that the human mind has such ‘a finite and narrow Capacity’ that ‘what lies beyond our positive Idea towards Infinity, lies in Obscurity’ (Essay, §2.23.34, 2.17.15). Such impediments to thought are represented as a problem of vision, resultant from ‘dull Organs’, which, ‘like Wax over-hardned [sic] with Cold, will not receive the Impression of the Seal’ (§2.29.3). Given these metaphors, we can see that Urizen – who inhabits the ‘hills of stor’d snows’ with ‘cold horrors’ (Urizen, 3.32, 27; E71) and whose ‘net of infection’ exerts a ‘hardening’ on his children’s ‘nerves’ (25.24–5; E82) – represents not only Lockean qualities of ‘passion, vigour and defiance’ as Clark suggests (‘Blake’s Response to Locke’, p. 148), but also the obscurity that despite Locke’s calls for clarity continues to function as the essential element of both the unseen creator and his creation. At the horizon of experience, ‘we fall presently into Darkness and Obscurity’ and the objects of both perception and reflection – both the self and its environment – are elevated to a condition of absolute alterity, for ‘our Faculties are not fitted to penetrate into the internal Fabrick and real Essences of Bodies’ (§2.23.32, 4.12.11). While he takes pains to prove that God exists and that our knowledge of him is not innate, Locke excludes God from the domain of human perception and, moreover, he conjoins this religious mystery with a failure to clearly perceive both the material world and the inner workings of the self: For though in his own Essence, (which certainly we do not know, not knowing the real Essence of a Peble [sic], or a Fly, or of our own selves,) God be simple and uncompounded; yet, I think, I may say we have no other Idea of him, but a complex one of Existence, Knowledge, Power, Happiness, etc. infinite and eternal: which are all [. . .] originally got from Sensation and Reflection. (§2.23.35)


It is precisely because knowledge of God is derived from empirical observation, which precludes in Locke’s view the clear perception of infinity and Eternity, that human beings should not pretend to divine knowledge. Empiricism under the Lockean model thus shields the deity from rational inquiry and interrogation: ‘For it is Infinity, which, joined to our Ideas of Existence, Power, Knowledge, etc. makes that complex Idea, whereby we represent to our selves the best we can, the supreme Being’ (ibid.). God acts and exists in a manner beyond human experience and to suggest otherwise would be to fail to understand the representational aspect of human knowledge, to fall into the error of mistaking the word for the idea or indeed of confusing the idea with the thing itself. ‘They who are wiser than the common People pronounce God to be invisible’, Swedenborg writes in Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, ‘which proceeds from their not being able to comprehend how God, as a Man, could have created Heaven and Earth, and fill the Universe with his Presence’.5 Like Priestley, Swedenborg seems to be suggesting that the ‘common People’ have a more accurate conception of the deity than the supposedly wise, and there may well be an ironic nod towards Locke here. Blake leaves no doubt as to the source of this error, explaining in the margin to the right of this text that ‘Worldly wisdom or demonstration by the senses is the cause of this’ (E603). Such ‘worldly wisdom’ is already at one remove from Locke in that its demonstration is sensual rather than abstract, which, as we will see, is a mode of demonstration that Blake categorically rejects. In denying innateness and removing the divine from the world of experience Locke rejects the faculty, the Poetic Genius, which, for Blake, permits man to perceive God – an act which performs an ontological transformation of one’s environment of the same kind, but with different effect, as that initiated by Urizen’s withdrawal from Eternity. Moreover, his circumscription of knowledge has far-reaching implications for his thoughts on ethics, which are rendered distinct from sensation and experience. ‘General and certain Truths, are only founded in the Habitudes and Relations of abstract Ideas’, but ethics, Locke insists, deals with abstract ideas and therefore its propositions can be demonstrated by following a mathematical model (Essay, §4.12.6–8). ‘Morality’, Locke insists, is ‘amongst the Sciences capable of Demonstration’ and thus, ‘from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematicks, the measures of right and wrong might be made out’ (§4.3.18). ‘Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth’, we read in The Marriage, and there is dearth aplenty in Locke’s vision of a geometrically sound moral code which divides the ethical from the sensual.

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Locke has replaced conscience, the only ethical arbiter Blake seems to have recognised, with the promise of an absolute and universal code of conduct. Locke’s founding of morality on mathematical demonstration has antecedents in Spinoza who had used the geometric method to arrive at a strategy for determining good from evil, but for Spinoza these categories are relational. That which we call ‘good’ involves a compatible relationship between our body and another, and ‘evil’ connotes an interaction with something destructive: ‘bad encounters, poisoning, intoxication, relational decomposition’ (Deleuze, p. 22). Moreover, virtue is not obedience but the striving for self-preservation, a definition that, as we will see, is very close to Blake’s (Ethics, 4.P22). In contrast, rather than looking outwards to the self’s relations with others, Lockean ethics depend on an inward turn that is not only reflective, but transcendental; moreover, as Blake knew first-hand, they lend themselves to appropriation by enemies of life, such as Watson in his attacks on the freedom of conscience advocated by Paine. ‘Virtue & honesty or the dictates of Conscience are of no doubtful Signification to any one’, Blake declares: Opinion is one Thing. Pricipl[le] another. No Man can change his Principles Every Man changes his opinions. He who supposes that his Principles are to be changed is a Dissembler who Disguises his Principles & calls that change[.] (Annotations to Watson, p. 3; E613) In a move not dissimilar to that made by Spinoza, Blake identifies conscience, the innate voice of God with Virtue & honesty as well as with Principles. The identification of ‘Virtue’ with ‘Principles’ is significant, for the latter term would appear to refer to an originary source of identity and action rather than an abstract moral guide or law. This reading is consistent with Blake’s application of ‘virtue’ in the annotations to Lavater and it clearly links his remarks on conscience with what he says elsewhere about the Poetic Genius, which Ezekiel tells us is the foremost of ‘the principles of perception’ (The Marriage, 12; E39). It is in the Poetic Genius that the moral and the philosophical trajectories of Blake’s critique of enlightenment science intersect. The first ‘PRINCIPLE’ in Blake’s original stereotype, ‘That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that the body or outward form of man is derived from the Poetic Genius’ (All Religions; E1), clearly links the faculty which experiences not only with the body, but also with others who by entering into relation with that body give life to experience. The Poetic Genius is thus the presence in the self of the power that initiates newness and makes experience possible by embodying existence in form:


PRINCIPLE 2d As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius PRINCIPLE 3d No man can think write or speak from his heart, but he must intend truth. Thus all sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic Genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual PRINCIPLE 4. As none by traveling over known lands can find out the unknown. So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire more. therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists. (All Religions; E1) The expansion of knowledge is tied directly to an alterity that makes experience possible, that not only offers the world to us as a gift but also allows for the possibility of newness and of thinking beyond the bounds of experience. Blake here anticipates Derrida, and his ‘principles’ themselves offer an explication of the principles of existence, both individual and universal.6 As that ‘which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon’, the Poetic Genius implies a mode of possession, an anterior impulse at the very heart of the self, without which identity itself would not be possible: ‘the forms of all things are derived from their Genius’ (ibid.). On plate 11 of The Marriage, we find two sorts of genius: the extraordinary poetic abilities of the ancients and the ‘Gods or Geniuses’ with which the ‘ancient Poets animated all sensible objects’ (E38). The plate proceeds to depict the process by which this creative activity, the expression of the impulse behind both philosophy and religion, falls into corruption. This history, as Blake notes earlier, is ‘written in Paradise Lost’ (The Marriage, 5; E34), but it also follows a pattern deployed throughout the Enlightenment in texts such as Volney’s Ruins and Priestley’s Corruptions.7 Notably, the enslavement of the vulgar is initiated through the attempt to ‘abstract the mental deities from their objects’ (The Marriage, 5; E38), and the fruits of such attempts are apparent in Locke’s promise of an ethics founded on abstract demonstration. But this promise could not be made unless the spirit of divinity had already been extricated from the objects of perception, unless, that is, God had already been rendered invisible. What this suggests is that Locke’s empiricism is itself grounded on an onto-theology that is anti-empirical. In debunking the (Lockean) myth which equates innateness with mental and political enslavement, Ferber remarks that while ‘the three most influential radical writers, Priestley, Paine, and Godwin, were in some sense empiricists and materialists, it is also true that many equally radical thinkers were not’. Moreover, he notes that Lockean empiricism itself ‘has affinities with

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conservatism, elitism, and relativism when it ceases to criticize superstition and erects an ethic of its own’ (Ferber, p. 23). What Ferber’s account leaves out is a closer account of the empiricism of a figure such as Paine, which carries within itself traces of that form of innateness that Ferber identifies with ‘an older Christian sense’, subscribed to by ‘the majority of the artisans and poorer classes of “radical London”’ (ibid.). In The Age of Reason, even as he insists on the expulsion of ‘all ideas of revealed religion, as a dangerous heresy and an impious fraud’, Paine motions towards an ethics founded on ‘the natural dictates of conscience’, which we are told ‘are nearly the same in all religions and in all societies’. And in Common Sense, the declaration that ‘the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise’ is followed with the remark that ‘were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver’.8 Blake, as we have seen, identifies with, and approves of, this aspect of Paine’s thought (even though he expresses some concerns about Paine’s deism), and it is a belief that can be clearly traced back through numerous strands of Protestant theology in the figure of the divine light within. Blake’s comments on principles, virtue and the Poetic Genius point towards an ethics based not on obedience but on honesty, and in particular on honesty to the self before all others. Such an ethics is closely bound up with the radical Protestantism of Milton, at least the Milton who is ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’ (The Marriage, 5; E34), but it is articulated perhaps most clearly by Shakespeare: This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.9 If it were possible to speak of a concept such as original sin in Blake’s work, it would be hypocrisy, and the origins of that sin would lie, as they do in Augustinian theology, within the soul. The original transgression, the primary deception from which all others follow is a deception of the self, or more accurately a betrayal, and a betrayal through denial of other within. In his meditation on the ethics of Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac, Derrida comments on the absolute other before whom the patriarch must answer: If God is completely other, the figure or name of the wholly other, then every other (one) is every (bit) other. [. . .]. God, as the wholly other, is to be found everywhere there is something of the wholly


other. And since each of us, everyone else, each other is infinitely other in its absolute singularity, [. . .] then what can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation without relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other, in particular my relation to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as Jahweh. (pp. 77–8) We are close to the ethics implied by the Poetic Genius here, though the secrecy and transcendence here ascribed to Yahweh should give us reason for pause, given Blake’s characteristic mistrust of obscurity and mystery. What is notable here, however, is that absolute alterity, which cannot easily be dissociated from what Blake might call ‘infinite variety’, initiates an ethics that is not ‘justifiable before men or before the law of some universal tribunal’ (p. 77). The alterity in the face of which Locke circumscribes experience and takes recourse to an ethics of abstract demonstration is interiorised in the figure of the Poetic Genius, which allows for the very possibility of experience itself – it is not only the faculty of experience, but also the source of all things corporeal and spiritual. Elsewhere, Derrida connects alterity and indeed revelation with the aporia of what he refers to as the perhaps: ‘without the opening of an absolutely undetermined possible [. . .] there would never be either event or decision’, but by the same token ‘nothing takes place and nothing is ever decided without suspending the perhaps while keeping its living possibility in living memory’ (Politics, p. 67). Like the perhaps, the Poetic Genius does not properly speaking belong to an ontology or theology, but rather it is that which makes such systems of thought possible as it adapts itself to the weakness of every individual. The history of thought relayed on plate 11 of The Marriage is designed to remind us that ‘All deities reside in the human breast’, but the Poetic Genius itself precedes this history, which begins with the externalisation of genius and is itself an embodiment of only one line of an infinite set of possibilities.

Infinity: Causes and consequences In opposition to Locke’s division of knowledge into demonstration and sensation, Blake declares that ‘Demonstration is only by bodily Senses’ (Annotations to Divine Love, §41; E64). Following Swedenborg’s lead, Blake insists that demonstration is itself limited to working with the materials provided by sensation. However, whereas Locke’s vision of enhanced sensation is based on a process of mechanical magnification – ‘this

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Microscopes plainly discover to us’, Locke writes in support of his claim that colour is the product of size, bulk and texture (§2.23.11) – in Blake’s view it is not how much you perceive, but rather how you perceive that will determine what you perceive. Locke approaches the notion of enhanced perception with an ambivalent combination of longing and suspicion. ‘And if by the help of such Microscopical Eyes’, he writes, speculating on a physiological improvement in sensation: a Man could penetrate farther than ordinary into the secret Composition, and radical Texture of Bodies, he would not make any great advantage by the change, if such an acute Sight would not serve to conduct him to the Market and Exchange; If he could not see things, he was to avoid, at a convenient distance. (§2.23.12) The empiricist in Locke seems to delight in imagining the augmentation of perception that would allow penetration into the mysteries of nature, but as a theologian he steadfastly insists that the creator has limited our sensory abilities for our own good. The contrary impulses that drive Locke to question the nature of reality and yet prevent him from actively articulating the desire for a penetrative gaze, that lead him to posit a world which the microscope perceives yet which remains unknown, are reiterated by the figures of Bromion and Theotormon in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which can be read in part as a response to the system of morality underpinning Lockean epistemology. Bromion, who as Frye notes ‘believes that there is an unthinkably mysterious and remote world beyond his reach’ (p. 239), embodies both Locke’s awe and admiration at the discoveries of the microscope as well as his presentation of the problematic relationship between perception and knowledge: Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit; But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth To gratify senses unknown? trees beasts and birds unknown: Unknown, not unpercievd, spread in the infinite microscope, In places yet unvisited by the voyager. and in worlds Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown[.] (Visions, 4.13–18; E48) Bromion’s distinction between the ‘unknown’ and the ‘unperceived’ speaks to Locke’s contradictory representations of the primary qualities


in objects, as those whose patterns are replicated faithfully in our ideas, but whose operations on our senses are nevertheless unknown. Likewise, Theotormon’s inquiry into the origin of joy – ‘Tell me what is a joy? & in what gardens do joys grow?’ (3.24; E47) – is entirely at odds with his moral position, which entails a rejection of Oothoon’s sexuality, and his posture on the frontispiece, where he sits with his head bowed and covered, suggests a refusal to confront the violence of desire and an unwillingness to accurately see the world around him. Theotormon’s religious predilection, which according to Oothoon has as its telos a ‘hypocrite modesty’ (6.16; E49), renders him unwilling to contemplate the violent and dangerous desires of Bromion, of Oothoon and of himself. Locke’s fascination with a penetrative vision that seems to offend his religious sensibilities could be read as similarly hypocritical and it is no coincidence that Urizen, the father of Theotormon’s jealous religion, is, in the Song of Los, the figure who gives the ‘Philosophy of Five Senses [. . .] into the hands of Newton & Locke’ (4.15–16; E68). Nevertheless, Locke unlike Theotormon allows himself to fantasise about the enhanced sensation that he insists is off-limits, speculating on the possibility that angels ‘can so frame, and shape to themselves Organs of Sensation or Perception, as to suit them to their present Design, and the Circumstances of the Object they would consider’. In the lines that follow, he continues to justify this potentially transgressive speculation by insisting it is within the bounds of sensation and reflection and, moreover, is consistent with the teaching of ‘the most ancient, and most learned Fathers of the Church’ (§2.23.13). Nevertheless, the force of his insistence that ‘our thoughts can go no farther than our own [faculties]’ is weakened by the fact that he does go further, imagining ‘Creatures with a thousand other Faculties, and ways of perceiving things’ (ibid.). At points such as this, where he is most transgressive and most inclined to ‘beg my Reader’s pardon’, Locke begins to become the sort of figure that might have appealed to Blake. Though he suggests that such super-sensual powers might be disadvantageous ‘in our present State’, this itself motions towards the possibility of an apocalyptic transformation in perception and it is possible to find traces of Locke’s speculations on angelic sensation in Blake’s depictions of the Immortals who can expand or contract their senses at will (Urizen, 3.37–8, 15.9–13; E71, 78). Blake also seems to have inherited Locke’s sense that at least to some extent, certain forms of limitation are necessary to lapsarian existence. His description of the fall as a process of division in texts such as Urizen, in which ‘the Eternal Prophet was divided/ Before the death-image of Urizen’ (15.1–2; E78), may well function as a broad parody of the

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philosophical quagmires Locke encounters when discussing infinite divisibility (cf. §2.2916); however, as Frosch suggests, Los’s forging of a world of limited perception, ‘the physical form of man and nature, as well as the outlines of sight’, prevents this fall from continuing forever, ‘from plunging further into an abyss of invisible abstractions’ (pp. 40–1). But if Los’s universe represents the extremity of the fall, opening it up to infinite perception requires the annihilation or drastic revision of the basic building blocks of that world and everything in it. Blake’s comments in The Marriage and elsewhere would seem to suggest he regarded the body as itself constituted by the very forces that, when organised correctly, give rise to existence as we know it. Ideas such as this were highly topical within the philosophy of the day and Blake’s thinking in this area is likely to have been influenced by Priestley, ‘the strongest voice in England to propose that the atom is an interplay of forces rather than a minute solid’ (Mary Lynn Johnson, p. 117). ‘It has been asserted’, Priestley writes, and the assertion has never been disproved, that for any thing we know to the contrary, all the solid matter in the solar system might be contained within a nut-shell, there is so great a proportion of void space within the substance of the most solid bodies. Now, when solidity had apparently so very little to do in the system, it is really a wonder that it did not occur to philosophers sooner, that perhaps there might be nothing for it to do at all, and that there might be no such thing in nature. (Disquisitions, p. 17) In place of solidity, Priestley introduces the ‘power of attraction’ as that which provides the cohesive effect that results in an object’s determinate form (pp. 5–6). Similarly, he explains the appearance of ‘impenetrability’ as the result of ‘a power of repulsion’, the effects of which have been observed in his own experiments with electricity and in Melville’s experiments on vision (p. 13). As with solidity, once the effects of impenetrability have been attributed to a power, impenetrability itself is transformed into an unnecessary philosophical chimera: Now if resistance, from which alone is derived the idea of impenetrability, is [. . .] caused by powers, and in no case certainly by anything else, the rules of philosophizing oblige us to suppose, that the cause of all resistance is repulsive power, and in no case whatever the thing that we have hitherto improperly termed solid, or impenetrable matter. (p. 11)


Once the appearances of solidity and impenetrability have been explained as the result of contrary powers (attraction and repulsion), rather than as inherent properties of matter itself, the dichotomisation of matter and spirit no longer makes sense. A strict adherence to the experimental method (which obliges us not to admit more causes of things than are sufficient to explain them, and to assume the same causes from the same effects) has, not coincidentally, yielded a description of reality consistent with Priestley’s own interpretation of the biblical texts. Priestley’s vision of the material universe as an energetic interaction between the contrary powers of attraction and repulsion bears a striking resemblance to Blake’s proclamation, in The Marriage, that ‘Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ (3; E34). Moreover, Priestley’s rejection of solidity as a property inherent in matter undermines the Urizenic attempt to reduce the universe to ‘a solid without fluctuation’ (Urizen, 4.11; E71). However, the eternal fires depicted in Urizen also evoke images of a Priestleyan universe in which solidity is itself underpinned by energy. Urizen’s quest for solidity is not only politically suspect, but also scientifically outmoded and his struggle is erroneous not because it is scientific, but because it is based on a circular model of reasoning that fails to take into account the fact that ‘the ratio of all we have already known. is not the same that it shall be when we know more’ (No Natural Religion [b]; E2). There are significant differences between Blake’s discussion of the necessaries of existence – ‘Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate’ (The Marriage, 3; E34) – and those described by Priestley. As Paley notes, Blake, unlike Priestley, ‘conceives of energy as erotic in origin and as revolutionary in its expression’ (p. 10). Moreover, Blake’s inclusion of ‘Reason and Energy’ and ‘Love and Hate’ in his enumeration of contraries effectively triples the number of contraries posited by Priestley. These additions add a subjective dimension that has profound consequences for Blake’s theory, suggesting not only that we can perceive the effects of these powers (which is Priestley’s only claim), but also that we can experience them directly in the motions and emotions of our own bodies. Nevertheless, both Blake and Priestley use their respective systems of contraries to similar effect, as part of an argument against the dichotomization of mind and body, and the spectre of Locke is repeatedly conjured by Priestley, who regards him as both a brother of enlightenment and an opponent who must be addressed: It is still more unaccountable in Mr. Locke, to suppose, as he did, and as he largely contends, that, for any thing that we know to the contrary, the faculty of thinking may be a property of the body, and

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yet to think it more probable that this faculty inhered in a different substance, viz. an immaterial soul. A philosopher ought to have been apprized, that we are to suppose no more causes than are necessary to produce the effects; and therefore that we ought to conclude, that the whole man is material, unless it should appear that he has some powers or properties that are absolutely incompatible with matter. (Disquisitions, pp. 31–2) Further into this discussion, Priestley chastises Locke a second time for the same error: Mr. Locke, who maintains the immateriality of the soul, and yet maintains that, for any thing we know to the contrary, matter may have the property of thought superadded to it, ought to have concluded that this is really the case. (p. 73) And although we might think that Priestley would have been tired of his pursuit of Locke, we see him invoking him again, near the end of his text, in order to deride him for not having the ‘courage, or consistency, to reject the doctrine [of dualism] altogether’ (p. 218). In short, Priestley’s criticisms of Locke amount to the accusation that, for reasons of prejudice or fear of persecution, he failed to employ the philosophical rigour required to embrace a doctrine of materialism. Priestley presents his idea of the single substance as not only more philosophically and theologically just, but also as easier to understand than dualistic systems like Locke’s because it is more in accordance with everyday experience and experimental evidence. However, like Locke he feels compelled to defend materialism against not only the charge, but the possibility that it will do damage to the deity by rendering him subject to human comprehension; thus, he insists that ‘no proof of the materiality of man can be extended, by any just analogy, to a proof [. . .] of a similar materiality of the Divine’ (Disquisitions, p. 107). And, in this defence he ends up reinvoking the same sort of obscurity as Locke, not only in his description of an abstracted and mysterious deity, but also in his discussion of empirical reality. Priestley remains faithful not only to Newton’s rules of philosophical inquiry, but also to the philosophy of five senses inherited from Locke. From Blake’s perspective, the fundamental error of this philosophy is not that it grants primacy to the senses, but that it only pretends to do this, while in fact it is doing just the opposite by limiting the senses to a perception of effects only. ‘The Philosophy of Causes & Consequences’, Blake remarks at the end of


Lavater’s Aphorisms, ‘misled Lavater as it has all his co[n]temporaries’ (p. 226; E601). Both Priestley and Locke posit a reality of causes that exists beyond our sense perceptions. Thus, although Locke maintains that our ideas of cause and effect are derived from sensory perception (2.26.1), he later argues that though we are able to perceive effects, ‘the causes, manner, and certainty of their production [. . .] we must be content to be ignorant of’ (4.3.29). Likewise, Priestley’s theory of materialism itself exists within the impermeable limits he places upon perception. Hence, his need to qualify his argument by noting that his discourse on the powers of attraction and repulsion contains a great deal of uncertainty: I by no means supposed that these powers, which I make to be essential to the being of matter [. . .] are self-existent in it. All that my argument amounts to is, that from whatever source these powers are derived, or by whatever being they are communicated, matter cannot exist without them; and if that superior power, or being, withdraw its influence, the substance itself necessarily ceases to exist, or is annihilated. (Disquisitions, p. 7) Priestley’s experimental data have provided him with a series of effects, which can only be translated into knowledge of causes by employing the ‘established rules of reasoning in philosophy’. And this translation will always be imperfect because Priestley, like Locke, needs obscurity in order to preserve God’s philosophical usefulness. Despite the confessional nature of Priestley’s declaration of uncertainty, this absence of knowledge is framed in such a way as to produce certainty, to conjure as if by magic the absolute belief in a disembodied deity. ‘Whatever source’, ‘whatever being’, the very language of the passage implicates the necessaries of existence in a hierarchy of being whose base consists of that which must remain fundamentally unknown.

The corporealisation of thought Despite the ambivalent language within which Priestley couches his discussion of ultimate causes, he presents his system of materialism, via Hartley’s doctrine of association, as a means to increase our knowledge of both the self and its ideas. His edition of Hartley’s Observations on Man is of particular interest as it provides an evolutionary link between dualist psychology as it descended from Locke and Priestley’s own system

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of materialism.10 Moreover, it provides insight into the manner in which empirical and material approaches to psychology could be – and indeed were – used to reinforce an authoritarian moral code. Although we cannot know whether Blake was familiar with Priestley’s edition of Hartley, it would have been available to him via Johnson, who published Priestley’s edition in 1790, followed by a reprint of the 1741 edition, under the original title, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty; and his Expectations, the following year.11 Johnson’s decision to reprint the earlier text is itself significant, not only as he commissioned Blake to engrave the frontispiece, but also because it suggests that the publication of Hartley’s Theory in 1790 had stirred up enough interest to warrant investing in a reprint. Hartley’s system draws upon the ‘doctrine of vibrations’ posited by Newton in the Queries at the end of Optics and the doctrine of association set out in Locke’s Essay (§2.33), yielding a model in which the organs of perception are physically affected by the objects of sense, which causes them to send vibrations along the nervous tissue to the brain and thus produce ‘ideas of sensation’ (Observations, pp. 12–13). More complex ideas – such as abstract thoughts, dreams, reveries and imaginings – are formed through the mechanical association of these ideas. As Priestley explains in one of his introductory essays: If two different vibrations take place in the brain at the same time, [. . .] the particles [. . .] will not vibrate precisely as they would have done if they had taken place separately; but each of them will vibrate as acted upon by two impulses at the same time; and [. . .] it necessarily follows that, if [. . .] one of the vibrations shall be excited, the other will be excited also. (pp. xx–xxi) Thus the particular vibrations of the brain work to produce the associations that underpin the entirety of mental activity. In order to bring Hartley’s model into line with the results of his own experiments, Priestley updates Hartley’s theory, replacing the depiction of nerves as tubular – an idea that Hartley inherits from Newton – with a representation of the nervous system as uniformly solid. This transition from liquid to solid, this hardening of the nerves as it were, enables Priestley to reconcile the immediacy of sensation and spontaneity of thought with physical laws concerning speed, distance and resistance. ‘Because dense bodies conserve their heat a long time’, he writes, ‘and the densest bodies conserve their heat the longest, the vibrations of their parts are of a lasting nature; and therefore may be propagated along solid fibres of uniform dense matter, to a great distance’ (p. xii).


Priestley also seeks to replace Hartley’s dualism with his own system of materialism. Priestley rejects Hartley’s fundamental proposition, that ‘MAN consists of two parts, body and mind’ (p. 1), again invoking developments in the natural sciences (p. xxiv). Of paramount concern for Priestley is the fidelity of the representation produced by his reworking of Hartley’s model. In order to be philosophically valid, Priestley insists, psychology must provide a picture that is not merely metaphorically representative of reality, but one which comes as close as possible to depicting the world as it actually exists. For this reason, he rejects ‘the language in which we generally speak of ideas’ as ‘characters drawn upon a tablet’ because ‘neither can any such tablet be found in the brain, nor any style, by which to make the characters upon it’ (pp. x–xi). Priestley is clearly motioning towards Locke here, but he is also continuing in the very Lockean project of reifying the human mind; by providing a material basis for psychology and reducing the mental to the corporeal, Priestley places objects of the mind on a par with the objects of the material world. However, although his model of the mind may be more accurate than that of predecessors such as Locke, it still does not close the gap between mental representations and the world they represent: Ideas themselves, as they exist in the mind, may be as different from what they are in the brain, as that peculiar difference or texture [. . .] which occasions difference of colour, is from the colours themselves. (p. x) A model such as Hartley’s can help us understand the operations of our machine-like bodies – from our organs of sense, through our nervous pathways, to our fibrous brains – and if it manages to account for the plethora of mental phenomena of which we are conscious, we can judge it to be empirically sound; however, no matter how well we understand the machine, the ghost that pulls the strings remains well hidden. Only by rendering the body as ineffable as the soul can Priestley infuse it with the power to sustain mental faculties; only by adopting a view of matter that is ‘subtle’ and ‘infinitely more complex than we had [previously] imagined’ (p. xxi), can he imbue it with the capacity for thought. Like Locke before him, Priestley binds this infinite complexity to the omnipotence of God: Now that we see that the laws and affections of mere matter are infinitely more complex than we had imagined, we may [. . .] be prepared to admit the possibility of a mass of matter like the brain, having

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been formed by the Almighty Creator, with such exquisite powers, with respect to vibrations, as should be sufficient for all the purposes above-mentioned; though the particulars of its constitution, and mode of affection, may far exceed our comprehension. (Ibid.) It would be perhaps too easy to read this ‘Almighty Creator’ as an expression of absence, an inscrutable being invoked to conceal a lack of knowledge which will disappear once we begin to know more. While this may well be part of the story, this sense of mystery functions as a constituent part of Priestley’s system. He is seeking to defend not only his scientific theory but also his theological position, and God’s supremacy both validates the philosophical possibilities that he explores and forecloses other possibilities that could be theologically unsound. For example, when he argues for a conceptualisation of human beings as being of the same kind as animals, he qualifies this with the insistence that this reclassification ‘does not necessarily draw after it the belief of their surviving death, as well as ourselves; this privilege being derived to us by a positive constitution, and depending upon the promise of God’ (p. xxiv). Similar concerns over the moral implications of their theories lead both Priestley and Hartley to tread carefully as they are ‘carried on’ by association into a doctrine of necessity. Hartley insists not only that ‘I do most firmly believe, upon the authority of the scriptures, that the future punishment of the wicked will be exceedingly great’, but also that ‘there is sufficient provision in the course of our lives to generate moral principles, sentiments, and feelings’ (pp. lvi, li). Volition and the sense of moral duty are here accorded the status of natural states of consciousness, embedded in human psychology and explainable in physiological terms. Priestley informs his readers: The first rudiments of the ideas of right, wrong, and obligation, seem to be acquired by a child when he finds himself checked and controuled [sic] by a superior power. [. . .]. He finds he cannot have his will, and therefore he submits. Afterwards he attends to many circumstances which distinguish the authority of a father, or of a master, from that of other persons [. . .] and by degrees he experiences the peculiar advantages of filial subjection. (p. xlvii) This emphasis on force as the primary attribute of authority is reminiscent of Burke’s discussion of the sublime attributes of God. Though the tone with which Priestley discusses childhood experiences of power may be milder than that with which Burke describes adult experiences of the


divine, like Burke he suggests that ideas such as love are subsequent to the experience of force. That said, Priestley carefully avoids the representation of moral behaviour as a simple matter of either advantage or necessity, for as the child develops new associations ‘modify the idea of mere necessity, till by degrees he considers the commands of a parent as something that must not be resisted [. . .] even though he has a power of doing it’ (p. xlviii). Once the idea of authority becomes internalised, physical necessity is replaced by a sense of moral obligation, which Priestley suggests is ‘easily transferred from the commands of a parent to those of a magistrate, of God, and of conscience’ (ibid.). With this sublimation of obedience, which internalises an abstract idea of authority encompassing the commands of fathers, governors and God, we find ourselves again drawing close to Blake’s image of the mind-forged manacles. The physiological description of nervous fibre has seamlessly blended into a discussion of the growth of moral fibre within an individual. Indeed, the Net of Religion has been hanging over the analytical descriptions of the mind’s internal processes from the outset as it must, given the exclusion of divine wisdom, of first causes, from empirical investigation. The representation of man in his entirety as a body composed of solid nerves has indeed led to the formation of laws of prudence, just as the narrowing perceptions of the children of Urizen bind them down to the earth not simply by reducing them to material entities, but by embodying them within a solid form that is disposed towards subservience. Blake appears to have been acquainted with at least the rudiments of Hartley’s system and his knowledge of contemporaneous theories about the nervous fibres is becoming increasingly recognised, as is the ambivalence with which he depicts it. Remarking on the significance of Blake’s visual images, Connolly remarks: Through his illustration of fibres, which can be identified with nerves, Blake calls attention to the usually hidden organ of sensitivity, the nervous system which links body and mind, and in turn links people with each other, keeping the individual from being a prisoner in his own body. (p. 64) This use of anatomical knowledge to represent a redemptive capacity inherent in the body’s structure – Connolly notes that the cardiovascular system likewise implies a physiological basis for sympathy – suggests an interest in the ways in which the body itself facilitates the development of social relations. Glausser similarly suggests that Urizen

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reworks both Lockean and contemporary ideas about the nervous system, noting that ‘nerves make a nice vehicle for suggesting prelapsarian monism, since they were said to communicate between spirit and matter’ (p. 55). Although Glausser notes that the solidification of the Eternals’ ‘nerves of joy’ (Urizen, 10.41; E75) is one of the effects of the Fall, he does not suggest where Blake may have come across this progression. However, this transition would seem to reflect a knowledge of the history of enlightenment psychology and physiology, of the changing representations of the nervous system – from the tubular nerves filled with ether (Newton and Hartley) or with animal spirits (Locke), to the solid nerves of uniformly dense matter presented by Priestley. Moreover, this same history could have suggested to Blake the idea of connecting nervous fibre with moral imposition in so far as the concept of association could be connected with a model of education which aimed, at least in part, to instil a sense of obedience and respect for authority.

‘Surgeing Sulphureous fluid’: The case of Urizen Frosch points out that in Blake’s view epistemology can affect the form of the human body itself, for ‘[he] believes that the human body changes, that it has a history, as rich and specific as the history of thought’ and ‘he takes the given body to be an invention of the empiricism of Bacon and Locke’ (p. 19). Urizen presents a parodic representation of the development of physiological representations of the nervous system, from ether-filled, tubular nerves to solid fibres, and depicts this as a physical transformation as well as a change in the manner in which the body is perceived. Moreover, the text ties this transformation to the very process of rational disengagement – the reification of the mind and the development of the punctual self – which writers such as Priestley and Hartley inherited from Locke. Although Los has been widely credited with – and blamed for – the creation of Urizen’s body, it appears that Urizen himself initiates the corporeal changes that he undergoes. At the commencement of the section describing the formation of Urizen’s body, the text tells us that 5: [Los] watch’d in shuddring fear The dark changes & bound every change With rivets of iron & brass; 6. And these were the changes of Urizen. (8.9–12; E74)


Los’s position as a spectator ‘smitten with astonishment’ (8.1; E74) makes it clear that the ‘changes’ are ‘of Urizen’ both because they are the properties of his body and because they are caused, albeit unconsciously, by Urizen himself. The work which Los performs during the seven ages of dismal woe is not the creation of Urizen’s body, but the continuation of the act of keeping ‘watch [. . .] to confine, / The obscure separation [i.e. Urizen] alone’, which begins on plate 5 (38–9; E73). Far from initiating Urizen’s metamorphoses, Los engages himself in the task of confining this disease of Eternity within the limits of linear time, ‘forging chains new & new / Numb’ring with links. hours, days & years’ (10.17–18; E75). The connection between Los’s labour on plate 8 and that on plates 10–13 is signalled on plate 10 by Los’s division of ‘The horrible night into watches’ (10; E75). Plate 8 seems to suggest that the act of watching itself effects the confinement of Urizen – as a spectator, Los is alert to any changes which might portend Urizen’s escape, while as a ‘watch’ or guard, Los is also the force preventing such escape from actually occurring. The pun on ‘watches’ therefore suggests that the division of the night has been effected with a view to creating a collection of watches who can watch Urizen on Los’s behalf. The divisions of clock-time – ‘the hours, days & years’ – whose symbol is a ‘watch’ (in its signification as a timepiece) are able to guard against Urizen’s escape because they are links on a chain that binds him down. As Urizen becomes bound in the chains of time that Los forges to hold him, the ‘Sulphurous fluid’ within which he has hidden his ‘phantasies’ undergoes a process of stagnation settling into ‘a lake [. . .] / White as the snow on the mountains cold’ (10.14, 22–3; E75).The use of snow to describe the lake suggests that it has been frozen and this in turn suggests a solidification of the sulphureous fluid which crystallises his thought and desire, thus precipitating the growth of the ‘vast Spine’ that ‘froze / Over all his nerves of joy’ (10.37, 40–1; E75). The process by which Urizen freezes his passions and encapsulates his thoughts is repeated in the curse he imposes upon his ‘eternal creations’ in Chapter VIII: He in darkness clos’d, view’d all his race And his soul sicken’d! he curs’d Both sons & daughters; for he saw That no flesh nor spirit could keep His iron laws for one moment. (23.22–6; E81)

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The text makes it clear that the fault lies not solely in Urizen’s children, suggesting instead that Urizen’s curse results from his realisation that sin is unavoidable in a world closed off from Eternity. The recognition of this inevitability causes Urizen’s tears to ‘[flow] down on the winds’ (25.4; E82). This evokes the image of the biblical flood as does the text’s final line: ‘And the salt ocean rolled englob’d’ (28.23; E83).Urizen conflates the deluge with the reduction of bodily stature and this reduction parallels the condensation and freezing of his own thoughts and desires earlier in the book. Like Urizen, his children ‘felt their Nerves change into Marrow’ and their ‘Senses inward rush’d shrinking, / Beneath the dark net of infection’ (25.24, 29–39; E82). Urizen’s fulmination operates as a contagion, and the Net of Religion, itself ‘twisted like to the human brain’ (25.21; E82), infects its captives, binding them ‘down / To earth by their narrowing perceptions’ (25.46–7; E83). Urizen’s web-spinning tears result from his own failure to subjugate his passions. Through a process of incessant division, Urizen has managed to fashion a body for himself in accordance with his iron laws. However, the by-products of that division, the leftover, waste material, his ‘eternal creations’, cannot keep to these laws. Ironically, his web of tears is strong enough to enclose the ‘wings of fire’ (25.19; E82), and his shadow manages to effect the bodily changes he himself has already undergone. However, even this is not enough, for at the end of the book: Fuzon call’d all together The remaining children of Urizen: And they left the pendulous earth: They called it Egypt, & left it. (28.19–22; E83) This exodus begins a process of rebellion in which the son combats his father and open energy attacks hidden reason – the story told in Ahania. Urizen’s displaced desire becomes transferred onto Fuzon whose ‘hot visage / Flam’d furious’, but in his attack Fuzon merely continues the process of disengagement initiated by his father, ‘dividing’ Urizen’s ‘cold loins’ and parting him from ‘his invisible lust’ (Ahania, 2–3.29, 30; E84). Fuzon has, in good Priestleyan fashion, learned the rudiments of power and authority from his godlike father. The narrator describes the paternal lust dissected by Fuzon as Urizen’s ‘parted soul’ and instructs


the reader to name it ‘Ahania’ (ibid., 2.32; E84). Thus separated from his soul, Urizen might appear dead and this is certainly the idea harboured by Fuzon who ‘Thought Urizen slain by his wrath’ (3.37; E86). However, Urizen’s existence itself is predicated on an attempt to empty himself of desire. From Fuzon’s perspective, the departure of the last vestiges of desire, the rendering of Urizen soulless, indeed signifies death. However, from a Urizenic vantage point, it is the ultimate triumph. Urizen has become the embodiment of pure will and it is this triumph that allows him to smite Fuzon’s ‘beautiful visage’ with the darkness of his own powerful sublimity (3.37, 41; E86). Once his lust is externalised, Urizen is able to name ‘sin’ and to crush Fuzon beneath the rock of Mount Sinai, the locus of the stony law. Urizen signifies his victory by nailing Fuzon onto the ‘Tree of MYSTERY’ (4.6; E87), a tree that as Blake has already told us is located in the human brain. It seems entirely probable that Blake’s image of this tree owes something to the reduction, in Priestley and Hartley, of thought to a system of solid fibres, though he may also have had in mind images of the sort found in William Cowper’s Anatomy of the Human Bodies, with its tree-like illustrations of the nervous and cardiovascular systems.12 Moreover, Urizen’s roles as father, priest and king might well provide an example of Priestley’s inculcation of morality taken to the extreme and they are certainly related to his activities as an empirical scientist throughout Urizen and Ahania. From his shadowy emergence in the ‘soul-shudd’ring vacuum’ (3.5; E70), he becomes associated with scientific modes of knowledge production, attempting to divide and measure existence (Urizen, 3.5, 8–9; 20.33–41; E70, E80–1). As Kittel points out, Urizen ‘is Blake’s poetic embodiment of Locke’s self ’, attempting to disengage from, and dominate, the other aspects of his identity and to remove himself from the Eternal community by creating his own world ‘Space by space in his ninefold darkness’ (Urizen, 3.11; E70).13 The parallels between Urizen’s nervous body and the body described in texts like Priestley’s edition of Hartley are part of this process of subjugation and control. On the one hand, Urizen’s body becomes the manifestation of his desires and fantasies, but this embodiment serves only to distort his lusts and obscure his eternal identity. On the other, the external world which Urizen inhabits is both constituted and populated by the materialisation of his divided soul (as in the case of Ahania), of his possessive emotions (such as his ‘mountains of Jealousy’ [Ahania, 2.33; E84]) and of his abstract thoughts, which emerge as ‘torrents of mud’ carrying ‘Eggs of unnatural production’ (Ahania, 3.9, 10; E85). However, Urizen’s attempts to liberate himself from his divided images lead not to a liberated individualism, but

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to tyranny, to the triple imposition of ‘One King, one God, one Law’ (Urizen, 4.40; E72). The connection between Urizen’s imposition of authority and a belief, such as Priestley’s, that an empirically derived doctrine of association can first establish and then replicate a system of moral order becomes evident through Urizen’s triumph over Fuzon. Fuzon’s defeat results from the ability of Urizen’s body to conceal, and by concealing increase ‘the primeval Priests assum’d power’ (Urizen, 2.1; E70). At the beginning of Ahania, Fuzon lists Urizen’s obscurity as a reason to reject his authority: Shall we worship this Demon of smoke, Said Fuzon, this abstract non-entity This cloudy God seated on waters Now seen, now obscur’d; King of sorrow? (2.9–13; E84) However, it is Urizen’s capacity for self-concealment which ultimately effects his supremacy. The bow with which Urizen slays Fuzon is formed in ‘dark solitude’ and is prepared in ‘silence’ (3.5, 24; E85). In addressing his weapon, Urizen himself associates its secrecy with the encapsulation of lust in nervous fibre: ‘O Bow of the clouds of secresy! / O nerve of that lust form’d monster!’ (3.26–7; E86). Likewise, in commanding the bow to ‘Send this rock swift, invisible thro’ / The black clouds’, he emphasises the stealth involved in his attack (3.28–9; E86). The narrator makes it clear that the bow is a weapon of obscurity, masking itself within ‘A circle of darkness’ (3.32; E86). Thus, the success of Urizen’s secret plan derives from Fuzon’s mistaken belief that Urizen has been ‘slain by his wrath’ (3.37; E86) and appropriately Fuzon’s defeat is portrayed as the triumph of darkness over light: His beautiful visage, his tresses, That gave light to the mornings of heaven Were smitten with darkness[.] (3.41–3; E86) This subordination of light to darkness which heralds the triumph of static solids over fluctuating desires is prefigured in Urizen, for Fuzon’s crucifixion is anticipated by the entanglement of Urizen’s children – Fuzon included – within the Net of Religion.


Although Ahania initially seems to continue the narrative from Urizen, the melting and subsequent solidification of Urizen’s ‘Nerves of Joy’ from Urizen (10.37, 40–1; E75) occurs again after Fuzon has been crucified. On the one hand, this suggests the circularity of Urizen’s struggle against desire, suggesting that, even at the zenith of victory, he has begun to approach the nadir of his defeat – notably, at the very point in Ahania when the formation and imposition of the solid body is complete, Fuzon’s life is reaffirmed, however pathetically, by his groan ‘on the Tree’ (4.44; E88). As Worrall suggests, this intersection of narrative fragments parallels and parodies Genesis by providing manifold retellings of the same event;14 however, this sameness is threatened by the text’s attempt to arrange them within a linear narrative. Such repetition also emphasises the psychological dimension of the text, for the battle against desire is first and foremost an internal conflict. Just as the bodily changes undergone by Urizen operate as the prototype for the changes undergone by his children, so too their subjugation is prefigured in Urizen’s own struggle against the turbulent elements in his world, his ‘unseen conflictions with shapes / [. . .] / Of beast, bird, fish, serpent & element / Combustion, blast vapour and cloud’ (Urizen, 3.14–17; E70). Although these are the primordial constituents of an inchoate world, they are also the outbirth of Urizen’s own internal conflicts. The text tells us that these shapes are ‘Bred from his forsaken wilderness’ (3.15; E70; emphasis added) and that the ‘enormous labours’ which occupy him are the efforts of a ‘self-contemplating shadow’ (3.22, 21; E71). Viewed in this light, we can read the fire with which he strives on plate 4, the fire by which he is ‘consum’d / inwards’ (4.14–15; E72), as the physical manifestation of the ‘tormenting passions’ that render him ‘unseen’ to the eyes of the Eternals (3.19; E71). Thus, Urizen’s announcement of ‘A wide world of solid obstruction’ (4.23; E72), which is followed by the announcement of his metal books and codified moral laws, prefigures his later obfuscation of desire, which manifests itself in the formation of the fibrous body. In the figure of Urizen as a will struggling against the turbulence of passion, we can hear echoes of Priestley’s definition of volition as ‘a modification of the passion of desire, exclusive of any tumultuous emotion’ (Hartley’s Theory, p. xxxiv), as well as Locke’s emphasis on reflexivity, disengagement and reification (that is, on transforming mental events into objectified things). To the extent that Urizen represents the enlightenment philosopher, we can see him as the unwitting producer of both a lapsarian mindset and a fallen body. However, while the enclosure effected by the production of this body is itself problematic, the more immediate problem is the fact that it is barely visible or, more precisely, that the energetic potential of the body is inaccessible to the sort of analysis

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conducted by Priestley and Hartley. By examining the body from a thirdperson perspective, by disengaging from bodily passions and desires, Blake’s scientific contemporaries are in effect examining a corpse. Moreover, their preconceptions of what a body is – not just a human body, but any body and indeed matter itself – preclude their ability to see the thing in itself. And this denial of vision occurs concomitantly with the presupposition that such a penetrating gaze does exist in the mind of a deity whose knowledge is total and whose authority over his subjects is absolute. This denigration of human sense, which is itself inscribed within an unshakeable faith in divine omniscience, recalls a further aspect that Derrida attributes to the spectre: Nor does one see in flesh and blood this Thing that is not a thing, this thing that is invisible between its apparitions, when it reappears. This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us. (Specters, 6–7) Derrida’s thinking here is framed by his reading of Hamlet’s ghost, but it is also connected to his thoughts on the link, highlighted through a reading of Patocka, between responsibility and the ‘absolute being who transfixes me, takes possession of me, holds me in its hand and in its gaze (even though through this dissymmetry I don’t see it[)]’ (Gift, p. 32). This notion of divine possession, of an alterior and divine light that penetrates the self, is one which Blake will capitalise on in his remarks concerning Christ and the Poetic Genius, which seek to open experience up to an apprehension of the spectre in Derrida’s sense of the word. However, in Urizen his concern is to highlight the limitations imposed by a move akin to the ‘visor effect’. In Priestley, no less than in Locke, the act of positing an invisible essence as the cause of sensuous appearance interposes a layer of uncertainty between the philosopher and the already deadened form that is to be studied, a gap between what can be seen and what can be known: Till the shrunken eyes clouded over Discernd not the woven hipocrisy But the streaky slime in their heavens Brought together by narrowing perceptions Appeard transparent air [. . .]. (Urizen, 25.31–5; E82)


It is easy to assume that this ‘streaky slime’ is the material world itself, the appearance that conceals the spirits of Eternity. However, the problem is not that this slime prohibits vision, but that it has itself been rendered invisible to eyes that have become ‘small like the eyes of a man’ (25.36; E82). Indeed, given that this slime is in the ‘heavens’, we can associate it with the ‘woven hipocrisy’ and the ‘Female in embrio’, whose embryonic form constitutes the ‘Net of Religion’ (25.18, 22; E82). The hypocrisy is involved not only in the formation of laws that flesh cannot keep, but, more profoundly, in the establishment of an empirical epistemology that refuses to see and that sacrifices understanding to obedience of a moral system that justifies the unjustifiable through alternately concealing and explaining away the inequitable relations between human beings.15 Transformations of Urizen’s body and his world suggest that the body or outward form derives its existence from energy or desire, which is by definition dynamic and therefore the antithesis of the sort of body – the ‘solid without fluctuation’ (Urizen, 4.11; E71) – after which the Urizenic philosopher-priest strives. In his emphasis on embodied experience, therefore, we can say that Blake embraces and elevates the transient world of appearances which within enlightenment empiricism is not only the object of scientific enquiry, but also the emblem of the ultimate limitation of human knowledge. If humankind were not obsessed with covering the body up or, worse still, with debasing it by reducing its ontological status to that of a mere effect, perhaps it would be possible to read in the body the signs of its origin, to read in its lineaments the story of prophetic creation during the fall from Eternity. This sort of exegetical act would seem to be what distinguishes Blake’s description of the human body in Urizen from that of his more scientific counterparts, for although this description operates as a parody it goes beyond merely mimicking its targets and beyond suggesting their flaws to provide a glimpse of Eternity that is kept hidden in the empirical texts of his day. The empiricists, no less than their opponents, felt the need to contain science and in so doing they ensured that human knowledge could never actualise its redemptive potential: at the end of history, God would still be necessary to restore eternal harmony and to grant immortality to human beings. Blake believed the opposite: redemption could only be attained by human endeavour, the palace of Eternity could only be built with human hands. Unlike the self-proclaimed fathers and sons of ‘Enlightenment’, the terrifying sublimity of the divine results for Blake not from mystery, but from awareness. As All Religions tells us, the

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source of existence inheres in existence itself: it is the Poetic Genius, and it inhabits every thing. It is the Poetic Genius which allows human inquiry to proceed from the known to the unknown and the fact that science has resulted in an acquisition of knowledge proves, for Blake, that this Genius exists. Moreover, by including ‘Reason and Energy’ and ‘Love and Hate’, as well as ‘Attraction and Repulsion’ in its list of necessary contraries, The Marriage humanises the powers that make up the fabric of existence. We can experience these forces as they are incarnated within our bodies and this is the experience of God. In the context of what Blake has said earlier in All Religions, the affirmation at the end of the text that ‘The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius’ suggests a power which is both internal and external. Likewise, the devilish proclamation on plate 22 of The Marriage, that ‘The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius’ (E43), seems to imply an external source similar to that posited by Priestley and Locke. However, Blake seems to qualify or even repeal this on plate 16 with the equally forceful statement that ‘God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men’ (E40). While it is possible that this tension may be the result of Blake’s inability to decide one way or the other, it may also reflect Blake’s unwillingness to fall into another dichotomous trap. Arguing that every man is God removes the need for otherness and seems to not only justify, but also promote the retreat into the self which Blake found so repugnant in Locke. On the other hand, emphasising otherness too much would result in the abstraction of divinity which Blake regarded as such a dangerous element in orthodox religion. The fact that this tension between the divinity of the self and the other occurs in All Religions, which had a much shorter production history than The Marriage, suggests that he envisioned divine power as constituted by the interaction of self and other. Blake’s enumeration of contraries suggests as much by virtue of the fact that each contrary can only arise in the space between two bodies. Attraction itself ceases to exist without the presence of an attractor and attractee, while emotions such as love and hate arise out of relationships between self and other. Blake’s absolute resistance to the sort of mystery produced by the abstraction of ideas, passions or divinities from their bodies is evinced in his consistent use of verbal and visual figures to represent these powers on a universal level. By using archetypes such as Urizen, Orc, Enitharmon and Los within a medium that self-consciously embodies the interaction of self and other, Blake manages to grant his discourse a universal or eternal status and thereby makes his personal visions of divinity applicable to a wider audience. Replacing the orthodox conception of an abstract,


obscure and mysterious deity with one arising out of the interaction of embodied spirits (i.e. existing beings or men – note the plural) removes the impulse to found either religion or science upon secrecy and thus facilitates a liberation from moral law and a celebration of energy as ‘Eternal Delight’ (The Marriage, 4; E34). This system can be aptly described as ‘visionary materialism’, a system in which seeing the physical world entails a vision of the spiritual, in which the sensual is not denied, nor restricted to the pursuit of philosophical pleasure, but improved to such an extent that corporeal and intellectual pleasures occur simultaneously.

3 Right Reason and ‘Sense Supernaturall’

I know now by experience, that there is a great deal of difference between knowledge, and thinking I know; for true knowledge it gives satisfaction to the spirit of man, and whoever knoweth the true God, must needs know the right devil: [. . .] for by this knowledge the spirit of man hath peace with God. – Lodowick Muggleton, A True Interpretation1 ‘The Jewish & Christian Testaments are An original derivation from the Poetic Genius’, reads the sixth principle of All Religions, ‘this is necessary from the confined nature of bodily sensation’ (E1). The confinement of sensation, as we have seen, results from historically specific representations of the body, and of matter in general, which sharply distinguish the material from the spiritual, the human from the divine. The derivative status of the Bible, however, is more difficult to reconcile with Blake’s later description of the First and Second Testaments as ‘the Great Code of Art’ (Laocoön; E274). Though these comments come much later in his life (Bentley suggests a possible dating of 1826),2 the centrality of the biblical text, both conceptually and stylistically, remains consistent across his corpus, even if Blake insists on reading it diabolically. Perhaps we may see a certain anticipation of Paine’s prioritisation of conscience over scripture at work in All Religions, as we find it reverberating throughout the annotations to Watson: The Bible or Word of God, Exclusive of Conscience or the Word of God Universal, is that Abomination which like the Jewish ceremonies is for ever removed & henceforth every man may converse with God & be a King & Priest in his own house. (p. 9) 71


These comments are consistent with a certain ambivalence, not to mention a disturbing anti-Semitism that we find throughout these annotations, which consistently represent the First Testament as ‘only an Example of the wickedness & deceit of the Jews’ (p. 5; E614). But the ‘original derivation’ in Principle 6 belies a deeper ontological aporia that threatens to engulf the entirety of mental and corporeal existence. The body, religion and philosophy, we are told, are each similarly derivative, adding urgency to the question of in what sense a derivation can justifiably be described as ‘original’. The only intelligible interpretation is to read the ‘original’ as the first of its kind, but a first that is always ancillary and contingent. The origins of the first would thus be traceable to an originary antecedent that precedes any recognisable form of existence. There are clear links with Derrida’s remarks on a certain madness of the perhaps here, which themselves – deliberately or without meaning to – reverberate with the echoes of a Blakean cosmogony: The modality of the possible, the unquenchable perhaps, would, implacably, destroy everything, by means of a sort of self-immunity from which no region of being, phúsis or history would be exempt. [. . .]. This would be an unprecedented time; a time which, reserving itself in the unique, would then remain without relation to any other, without attraction or repulsion, nor living analogy. Without even this friendship for itself, nor this enmity: without the love or the hate that would make this time appear as such. (Politics, p. 76) This vision of the unprecedented time of the perhaps, Derrida insists, is a fiction, though the stories it appropriates are familiar to the late twentieth century – the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of capitalism. There is an eschatology at work here and an aetiology, a nostalgia for the originary impulse of the event. There is also – and this is significant for a philosophical turn that describes itself as ‘madness’ – a hearkening after an antinomian and pre-enlightenment mode of theosophy: We give you to understand this of the divine essence; without nature God is a mystery, understand in the nothing, for without nature is the nothing, which is an eye of eternity, an abyssal eye, that stands or sees in the nothing, for it is the abyss; and this same eye is a will, understand a longing after manifestation, to find the nothing; but now there is nothing before the will, where it might find something, where it might have a place to rest, therefore it enters into itself, and finds itself through nature.3

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The Poetic Genius stands poised between the perhaps and the abyssal eye, the product and progenitor of a polymorphous inheritance. But what would Blake make of Boehme’s abyssal eye, itself a version of that mystery or mysterium which haunts Derrida’s meditations in The Gift of Death and elsewhere? If as suggested above Blake goes further than Locke in developing an experience-based epistemology and further than Priestley in his contempt for mystery, what are we to make of the ulterior positioning of the Poetic Genius?

‘Where else is heaven?’: The ranting impulse and inner light Two things are worth noting here. First, Blake, unlike Derrida and to an even greater extent than Boehme, insists on embodying the source in a human form. This is an idea that he picks up from Swedenborg, though he may also have in mind the Kabbalists’ Adam Kadmon, and the production history of the illuminated books can in some sense be read as an attempt to make manifest this universal man. The second and related point pertains to the question of vision, and in particular to the expansion of perception associated with the concept of visionary materialism touched on above. Exceeding the bounds of Lockean empiricism and Priestley’s doctrine of the single substance, a visionary materialism would share certain affinities with Derrida’s description of the perhaps, which is itself related to the development of an hauntology alluded to in Specters of Marx. Whereas the perhaps makes possible the arrival of newness, of the event that cannot be anticipated or predicted, cannot be mapped out in advance of its arrival, the hauntology involves a thinking beyond the experience of the known through the figure of the spectre, which can represent a tentative embodiment not only of one or more ghosts from the past, but also of the event to come: If the enlightenment critique sought to remove the spectres or illusions that cloud perception, the post-enlightenment is counter-conjuration. The ghost, veil, figure or spectre – the movement of différance that allows one to perceive a world beyond any particular, differentiating between actual and virtual – is not added on to an otherwise whole and autonomous life. It is only through the figure or image that life gives itself to be thought, to live. In the beginning is the ghost. Without the figure of the not-given, virtual, anticipated whole of life, there could be no thought or future. (Colebrook, p. 23)


This sense of the necessity of visualising the invisible is, Colebrook notes, central to Blake as it is for Derrida. Blake develops a conception of appearance as that which clothes Eternity in a visible form, bringing it into the world of experience. There is thus an analogue between the Derridian spectre and the world forged by Los, in which the fallen body contains within it a vision of the infinite – an idea which as Aubrey notes seems to have been inherited from Boehme.4 In this respect, the visionary materialist apprehends the type of experience embodied by Derrida’s spectre as a vision of the past, present and future that is indissolubly linked to the infinite and eternal: What distinguishes the specter or the revenant from the spirit [. . .] is doubtless a super-natural and paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible [. . .]; it is also, no doubt, the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other. [. . .]. This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority [. . .] and asymmetry. (Specters, p. 7) The spectre thus responds to the question whispered in the ‘fiction’ of the perhaps: ‘without an enemy, and therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua self?’ (Politics, p. 77). The spectre, that is, assumes the role of the friendly enemy, the absolute alterity with which the self enters into relationship, expressing its identity before every other who, by virtue of being other, becomes one of the infinitely various members in the body of the ‘true Man’. ‘Five windows light the cavern’d Man’, sings the fairy on plate iii of Europe, before proceeding to enumerate the five senses, finishing with touch, through which man may ‘pass out what time he please’ (1–4; E60). As Larrissy notes, though the senses are limiting, ‘they are also liberating’, and the sense of touch, ‘which Blake compounded with sexuality [. . .] will permit humanity to escape from its imprisonment’ (p. 92). Aubrey notes a distinction in Boehme, part of a Pauline inheritance, between ‘flesh (sarx), which is fundamentally opposed to spirit, and body (soma), to which no such intrinsic dualism can be applied, [. . .] made for the Lord, and ultimately bound for him’. However, Boehme departs from Paul by partially effacing this dichotomy with the suggestion that ‘the spiritual body lies within the natural body, and is therefore potentially available in the present’ (p. 52). This potentiality is expressed differently by Blake’s


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fairy and by Derrida’s spectral body without flesh, but both point towards a relationship with the other that will allow for an approach to divinity that is dependent both upon the confined nature of bodily sensation – the arrival and irredeemably pastness of the event – and upon which that experience of the body itself depends. While Boehme did not ‘wish to promote the kind of indulgence in the senses that Blake advocates’ (Aubrey, p. 54), precedents for proverbs such as ‘the lust of the goat is the bounty of God’ can be found throughout a range of groups, many of whom embraced aspects of Behmenism and which collectively form part of Blake’s multifarious spiritual inheritance (The Marriage, 8; E36). The celebration of sexuality as an enactment of union with the divine was, for a time at least, a central component to the beliefs of the Moravian Congregation in Fetter Lane, to which Blake’s mother belonged and with whom his father was also associated during the ‘Sifting Period’, a period of ‘experiments in social egalitarianism, magical practices, and sexual antinomianism’.5 Likewise, Swedenborg, who experimented with erotic, heterodox Jewish mysticism and ‘recorded many of the lurid sexual ceremonies of the Moravians, which initially attracted but later repelled him’ (Schuchard, ‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’, p. 50), ascribed a high spiritual significance to conjugal love. And, an indulgence in sensuality also figured highly amongst many of the evangelists and pamphleteers from the civil war period, known retrospectively as the Ranters. Thus we find Laurence Clarkson (or Claxton) drawing on the concept of interior light and antinomianism latent in Pauline theology: that act called Adultery, in darkness, it is so; but in light, honesty, in that light loveth it selfe, so cannot defile it selfe: for love in light is so pure, that a whore it cannot endure, but estranges it selfe from darknesse from whence whoredom has its first original. Love is so pure, that it will not lodge with two; but treads the steps of the Apostle, saying, Let every one have his own wife [I Cor. 7.2].6 ‘Brothel’s [are built] with bricks of Religion’, we read in The Marriage (8; E36), and Blake’s own polygamous beliefs, founded on a similarly ‘infernal’ reading of the Bible, are widely documented, though the extent to which he sought to conform practice to theory is still a matter of speculation (Schuchard, ‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’, pp. 43–7). A consideration of inner light forms a pivotal point in Derrida’s meditation on the economics of justice between the human and the divine, which imbricates the sacrifice of Isaac with the Gospel of


Matthew. God returns Isaac, relinquishes his demand, ‘once he is assured that a gift outside of any economy, the gift of death – and of the death of what is priceless – has been accomplished without any hope of exchange, reward, circulation, or communication’ (Gift, p. 96). When Christ thrice reiterates, in Matthew 6.2, ‘and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee’, it is this renunciation of calculation, this breaking with a terrestrial economy of reciprocity, that will open the celestial economy of non-reciprocity and bring to the table a reward, the value of which cannot be measured in human terms. But the spirit of the act is of paramount importance – the ulterior motive behind the charity (agapaô/caritas) extolled by Paul in I Corinthians 13 is constituted by love not calculation – and it must therefore be accessible and assessable. Thus, the interiorisation of light is required to heal the wound opened by the rending of heaven from earth and Derrida proceeds to trace a certain logic of inner light: ‘Once the light is in us, within the interiority of the spirit, then secrecy is no longer possible’, he remarks, noting that once the soul shines with this light it is no longer possible to hide the objects of this world – ‘cities, nuclear arms’ – from view (p. 101). The internal and subjective thus takes priority over objective, worldly means of calculation and judgement. The conscience, Blake’s ‘voice of honest indignation’ (The Marriage, 12; E38), cannot be objectified, reified, quantified or measured by the rules of Newton or Locke: ‘There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find’, Blake writes in Milton, whilst in The Marriage he notes simply that ‘He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star’ (Milton, 35.43; The Marriage, 7; E136, 35). But Blake cannot be mapped this neatly on Derrida. For ‘if this spiritualization of the “interior light” institutes a new economy [. . .], then it is breaking with, dissociating from, or rendering dissymmetrical whatever is paired with the sensible body’ (Derrida, Gift, p. 101). But, for Blake, ‘the abyss of the five senses’ that we find on plate 6 of The Marriage (E35) speaks to the incorporation of divine prolificity in the sensible body and is, as Viscomi remarks, the medium of transport by means of which the artist travels to the printing house of hell and back (Swedenborg and Printmaking, pp. 35–6). In this respect, Blake expresses a more extreme reading of the Gospels that resurrects the demonstrative impulse of Ranters such as Clarkson, Coppe and Salmon who not only locate, but seek to enact redemption in the world of corporeal experience. ‘Where else is heaven, but in our present peace / From him?’, Clarkson asks in the prefatory poem to his evocatively titled ‘A Single Eye’:


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[. . .] look not above the Skies For God, or Heaven; for here your Treasure lies Even in these Forms, Eternall Will wil reigne. (p. 162, ll. 15–19) In Clarkson’s compatriot, Coppe, this emphasis on sensual perception takes on an overtly exegetical function, for ‘the eternall God may be seene, felt, heard, and understood in the Book of the Creatures, as in the Book of the Scriptures’, while in Salmon spiritual perception yields a vision of ‘the sparkling beams of eternity, darting out their refulgent beauty in and through variety’.7 Such divine immanence clearly intersects with Behmenism – in particular with Boehme’s reworking of Paul’s division of sarx from soma – and it is echoed by Europe’s fairy who when asked ‘what is the material world, and is it dead?’ responds by promising to ‘shew you all alive / The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy’ (iii.13, 17–18; E60). This spiritualisation of experience, the infusion of divine energy throughout existence corresponds with a conceptualisation of a light that is both celestial and terrestrial: God that is light appeareth in you, discovering to you that the light in the creature is not the same light of the Sun, yet the appearance of light in me, sheweth me (and that from Scripture declareth to me) that one is as much divine as the other; no more precious (simply in it self) then the other: for as you have heard, though Lights, yet but one Light with God. (Clarkson, p. 166) The interiorisation of light thus participates in the logic of light that Derrida connects to justice, but for the Ranters the breach between the divine and the human has indeed been effaced, breaking apart all modes of ethical economy. ‘Remember that if thou judge not thy self’, Clarkson reminds his readership, ‘let thy life be what it will [. . .] yet if thou judge not thyself, thou shalt not be judged.’ The gaze of the deity, the absolute other – who to be sure is still walking the corridors of the soul – is here identified with the carnal eye of the self: ‘yea act what thou canst’ (p. 171). For some such as Salmon, however, the opening of the spiritual eye involves that ‘enthusiasm or fervor for fusion’, that ‘demonic rapture’, which, Derrida tells us, Patocka connects to ‘the loss of the sense or consciousness of responsibility’ (Gift, p. 1):


I appeared to my selfe as one confounded into the abyss of eternitie, nonentitized into the being of beings; my soule split, and emptied into the fountaine and ocean of divine fulness: expired into the aspires of pure life: In briefe the Lord so much appeared that I was little or nothing seene; but walked at an orderly distance from my self. (‘Heights in Depths’, p. 212) The vision of the formerly invisible other here annihilates the self, but the identity of that self has not been consigned to oblivion – a spectral self it walks ‘at an orderly distance’. The celestial economy of justice has here been fulfilled, God has showed himself, presented himself before the gaze of the human soul, but this excessive appearance – ‘the Lord so much appeared’ – rends apart the onto-theological ground of the self, forever altering the one who sees. And this justice of incommensurate experiential exchange has been brought about precisely by the gift of death: ‘I was alive once as well as you, and in my life I laboured amongst you [. . .]; but I am now dead with the Lord.’8 For the likes of Coppe, Salmon and Clarkson, visibility of the mysterious other removes the visor-effect that Derrida associates with the spectre, the experience of being seen without seeing that initiates ‘an essentially blind submission to his secret, to the secret of his origin: this is a first obedience to the injunction’ (Specters, p. 7). And this deity is no less tremendous for being seen. To be sure, the sublime experience described by Burke, the overwhelming of the finite self by the infinite other, remains, but the vision abolishes law and renders obedience obsolete. All of this comes about through the interiorisation of mystery, of a light that is also a darkness: ‘to this end you may read Light and Darkness as both alike to God’ (Clarkson, ‘Single Eye’, p. 165). The unfolding of the divine mystery in the soul, for a seer such as Coppe, heralds an identification with that which is hidden, which with no hint of paradox allows it to be identified and deciphered. Offering up one ‘Clavall hint’ to his readers, Coppe declares: That which is here (mostly) spoken, is inside, and mysterie. And so farre as any one hath the mysterie of God opened to him, In Him, can plainly reade every word of the same here. (Sweet Sips, p. 49) Coppe writes of emptying out of ‘selfe’ and ‘flesh’ and the expulsion of the other that tries to hide inside the soul. But this unwelcome visitor that refuses to make itself presentable is in fact the antithesis of the


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interiorised light: ‘and therefore pray—that Antichrist in you (fore he hath been, and is in us when we knew it not) may be dispossessed, [. . .] may be destroyed, with the brightness of [God’s] coming’ (p. 56). But far from heralding an end to responsibility, the opening out of mystery and casting out of the once-secret self initiates what might be called an ethics of the perhaps, a new form of hospitality: ‘I will come to Visions and Revelations of the Lord’, Coppe writes, ‘and these are looked upon as new Lights too, and Strangers’; such strangers are to be welcomed, Coppe tells us, for the unfolding of mystery does not herald an end to the possibility of being surprised by the divine: ‘be not forgetfull of entertaining Strangers, for some in so doing have entertained Angels unawares’ (p. 63). This living-in-mystery, the experience of being let into the secret, not only preserves the sense of messianic expectation, of eschatological hope, but retains a sense of the political, of the friendly stranger and of the known enemy. Internalising the prophetic voice of Isaiah, Coppe heralds the arrival of divine retribution: ‘Behold, behold, behold, I the eternall God, the Lord of Hosts, who am that mighty Leveller, am coming (yea even at the doores) to Levell in good earnest.’9 The neighbour here has become the enemy and the stranger/self waits at the door, ready to give the gift of justice, of death to those who will not accept it of their own accord. The opening of spiritual mystery is connected to what Hill refers to as the democratisation of the Bible,10 which for Coppe proclaims the arrival into history of the promise of justice, of redress. If priests and kings teach that ‘those words are to be taken in the Mystery only; and they onely point out a spirituall, inward levelling (once more, for your owne sakes, I say) believe them not’ (p. 88). The promised reward is not to be received in private, but will be displayed openly. This making public of the secret is in accordance with a variant translation of Matthew 6.2 that opens the way for a markedly different interpretation of Christ’s promise. The French version employed by Derrida translates the final three words as ‘te le rendra’ (he shall reward thee),11 a literal rendition of the Greek and Latin texts (reddet tibi/apodosi soi) that preserves the sense of secrecy initiated in the relative clause, ‘who sees in secret’. However, the King James Version, as well as John Wesley’s 1790 translation, implies a removal of secrecy, an open reward: ‘thy father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly’. This variant accords well with the development of an alternative history of interiority, one which seeks to make the light of the soul public, to bring it into the light of day and identify the faces of Angels and Devils in the countenances and acts of the men and women who walk the streets: ‘This Angel,


who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend’, Blake tells us, echoing Coppe, who likewise beholds ‘Angels (now) come down from Heaven, in the shapes and formes of men’, whom ‘I have been acquainted withall’ (The Marriage, 24; E44; ‘Fiery Flying Roll’, p. 91). This alternative tradition of divine mystery, one which incarnates it within the world of experience and still preserves the anticipation of change both in the self and the other, highlights the disjunction, alluded to above, between Blake and Derrida: the asymmetry and nonreciprocity of the gaze. With echoes of an inheritance shared with Boehme, Derrida remarks on the mysterium tremendum: the terrifying mystery, the dread, fear and trembling of the Christian in the experience of the sacrificial gift. This trembling seizes one at the moment of becoming a person, and the person can become what it is only in being paralyzed, in its very singularity, by the gaze of God. (Gift, p. 6) This then is the initiation in the secrecy of interiority ascribed to the light within and it is the inheritance of Locke more than of Coppe, Clarkson and Salmon. In tracing the ethical genealogy outlined by Patocka, Derrida notes the transformations and incorporations – the process of vanquishment, incorporation and repression – of the orgiastic or demonic mystery that occur in Platonism and Christianity successively. In particular, he comments on the exchange of mystery for secrecy – ‘the secretum whose sense points towards a separation (se-cernere) and more generally towards the objective representation that the conscious subject keeps within itself’ – and this act of separation itself ‘involves gaining access to the individualisation of the relation to oneself, to the ego that separates itself from the [orgiastic] community of fusion’ (p. 20). In this disengagement of the self, with its rejection of the orgiastic and communal in favour of autonomy we may well perceive the spectre of Locke’s punctual self. Moreover, with the inward turn that perceives, or rather demonstrates through reason and intuition, the presence of an ulterior and inaccessible force capable of perception and cognition, we come close to the unempirical knowledge that the Lockean self possesses with regard to the deity (Essay, §4.10.1–12). Mathematical demonstration and abstract ideas perhaps have more in common with the orientation of the Platonic self towards the Good, but in the obscurity and confusion that for Locke cloaks the infinite and the eternal, there is at least an anticipation of the secret of the mysterium tremendum, ‘which retains


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something of the thaumaturgical tradition, and the secret of the orgiastic mystery from which Plato tried to deliver philosophy’ (Gift, p. 7). The orgiastic and demonic mystery therefore remains repressed, kept in secret but kept all the same, and Derrida, following Patocka, notes that ‘every revolution, whether atheistic or religious, bears witness to a return of the sacred in the form of an enthusiasm or fervor, otherwise known as the presence of the gods within us’ (p. 21). This eruption of the orgiastic is evident in both England and France during the 1790s, as it was during the English Civil War over a century before, but it did not disappear during the intervening period of rational ‘enlightenment’, as Thompson makes clear (pp. 22–64). Nor can this alternate tradition of open or public mystery be said to have been driven entirely underground. Indeed, the Moravians provide an excellent, if somewhat atypical, example of a spiritual community, whose practices and beliefs display marks of the orgiastic in their emphasis on the worship of an embodied, visible and highly eroticised deity, but who nevertheless achieved parliamentary recognition as sister Church to the Church of England (Schuchard and Davies, p. 38). The post-enlightenment stance that Blake shares with Derrida – his opening of onto-theological systems to the experience of newness, his recognition of the (Derridean) spectre and his sense of the self’s relation to an absolute other who is every other – is not only complemented by, but in fact develops out of a pre-enlightenment inheritance that promotes the opening of mystery and the accessibility of the divine gaze. The unfolding mystery, the secret demanding to be shouted from the rooftops (thy father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly, in public, proclaiming your gift to the world), this variant version of the interiorised light has serious implications for the definition of responsibility, which can no longer be defined only as the ‘exposing of the soul to the gaze of another person, of a person as transcendent other, [. . .] who looks without the-subject-who-saysI being able to reach that other, see her, hold her within the reach of my gaze’ (Gift, p. 25). In the alternative genealogy of an open mystery, the other is within reach: the seeing, hearing and holding are reciprocated by the human self, even as it is overwhelmed by brilliance and magnanimity and even though the other always remains changeable, capable of surprise: And I have looked upon [Angels] as Devils [. . .] and have run from place to place, to hide my self from them [. . .] and have been utterly ashamed when I have been seen with them.


But for my labour; I have been plagued and tormented beyond expression. So that now I had rather behold one of these Angels. (‘Fiery Flying Roll’, p. 91)

The spiritual substance An emphasis on the corporeality of spiritual beings functions as a fundamental article of faith for that ‘peculiar people’, the Muggletonians, who provide a ‘direct line of continuity between the antinomianism of the Civil War sects and the London of the 1790s’ (Thompson, p. 65). While it remains possible that Blake may have been acquainted with certain tenets and practices of this sect, Thompson’s hypothesis that Blake’s mother was a Muggletonian has now been definitively disproved (see Davies as well as Schuchard and Davies). However, the Muggletonians are interesting for another reason. Whereas Thompson treats the anti-rational aspects of Muggletonian thought as evidence of their part in a ‘ “counter-enlightenment” resistance’ (p. 86), a reading of their texts alongside Hobbes’ Leviathan, produced during the same period of civil upheaval, suggests that their tirades against reason can be seen as a particular and indeed peculiar manifestation of an empirical impulse that can be read as an analogue of Blake’s own visionary materialism. Indeed, for Muggleton and Reeve, writing in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the attack on reason is framed by a redefinition and expansion of perception that anticipates the distinction Blake draws between organic and poetic modes of perception: ‘there is a true reality in the spiritual sense, though invisible, which cannot be seen but by the eye of faith, as the temporal was seen and known by the eye of reason’ (True Interpretation, pp. 51–2). In comparing the Muggletonians to the Quakers and the Ranters, Thompson remarks that ‘an intense sectarian dispute is often the signal of an affinity’ (p. 66). However, Muggleton’s dispute with the Quakers in particular results from an underlying and equally sectarian dispute with those who would employ reason in the services of theology: For every one that hath but one eye, that is the eye of reason, may see that all the other churches, hath such a deal of corruption, superstition, unjustness, idolatry, and many other wickednesses, which reason itself doth judge cannot be the way of God. And that is the very cause that when people have been unsatisfied in the way of worship in the other churches, they have declined from them, and have turned Quakers. (True Interpretation, p. 20)


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Muggleton represents the dispute with the Quakers as a conflict in modes of vision between the eye of reason and the eye of faith, ‘which the Quakers ministery [sic] doth not teach’ (ibid.). The eye of reason can only perceive outward ordinances and acts, for though ‘the righteousness of faith is a real spiritual substance, as the righteousness of the law is; yet none of them both can be seen by the visible eye of sense, not as they be in their essence or seed, but by the effects or fruits they are known’ (p. 36). This extrapolation on the limitations of reason and sense perception accords well with the critique of enlightenment science suggested above. That said, to describe Muggleton’s works as ‘counterenlightenment’ is anachronistic, given that the majority of these were first printed decades before the texts of Newton and Locke. A more accurate description of Muggleton’s dispute with reason, which indeed anticipates later critiques of the Enlightenment, is to consider this as part of a pre-enlightenment tradition that positions itself dialogically in relation to the embryonic form of enlightenment science we find contained in Hobbes and Bacon. Muggleton’s insistence that the ‘eye of sense’ cannot perceive spiritual substance echoes Bacon’s own insistence that the study of nature cannot explain the mysteries of God: if any man shall thinke by view & inquiry into these sensible and materiall things to attaine that light, whereby hee may reveale unto himselfe the nature or will of God: then indeed is he spoiled by vaine Philosophy: For the conte[m]plation of Gods Creatures & workes produce (having regard to the workes & creatures themselves) knowledge, but having regard to God, no perfect knowledge but wonder, which is broken knowledge.12 In a similar vein, Hobbes differentiates between the objects which we perceive and the appearances which constitute sense perception: ‘the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another’ (p. 14). Moreover, he distinguishes three distinct aspects of the divine voice, ‘Rational, Sensible, and Prophetique’, which correspond with three modes of perception, ‘Right Reason, Sense Supernaturall, and Faith’ (p. 246). It is easy to overlook this threefold distinction of knowledge, for Hobbes focuses his ensuing discussion almost exclusively upon the rational aspect of God’s word. This privileging of the natural over the supernatural itself stems from the limitations that Hobbes takes to be imposed by nature, for ‘no man can infallibly know by naturall reason, that another has had a supernaturall revelation of Gods will’ (p. 198). There is a clear connection


here with the notion of an inaccessible alterity, though interestingly it is the human other, the prophet, whose claim to spiritual vision cannot be empirically validated, rather than the possibility of divine revelation itself: ‘seeing therefore Miracles now cease, we have no sign left, whereby to acknowledge the pretended Revelations, or Inspirations of any private man’ (p. 259). This reluctance to deny the ongoing possibility of revelation also finds its way into Locke, who, though he defines ‘Reason’ as ‘natural Revelation’, also defines ‘Revelation’ as ‘natural Reason enlarged by a new set of Discoveries communicated by GOD immediately’ (Essay, §4.9.4). Locke likewise retains a belief in miracles, for ‘omnipotent Power’ can ‘make any Instrument work, even contrary to Nature, in Subserviency to his Ends’; moreover, he goes further than Hobbes, for he does not insist that miracles have ceased, but simply that they are used sparingly because ‘if it were not so [. . .] Miracles would lose their Name and Force; and there could be no Distinction between Natural and Supernatural’.13 It is precisely this expansion of reason which Locke proposes and the overcoming of the natural/supernatural dichotomy which he resists, that Blake seems to have incorporated into his own ideas about expanded vision. No Natural Religion tract [b] opposes the empirical claim, voiced in tract [a], that man ‘is only a natural organ subject to Sense’ with the declaration that ‘Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover’ (E2). Blake is not rejecting perception as a mode, or even the mode, of knowledge acquisition, but rather is seeking to redefine perception as something that is not limited to the sensory ‘organs’ as described by thinkers such as Locke. Far from refuting the proposition that ‘The desires & perceptions of man untaught by any thing but organs of sense, must be limited to objects of sense’ (No Natural Religion [a]; E2), Blake seems to be admitting such limitation is a very real, and a very undesirable, possibility. What he does not seem to be suggesting, however, is that the solution to this problem is the invocation of an abstract and transcendental ideal. The visionary materialism that Blake’s works promote is tied to a particular conceptualisation of the divine that positions God within, rather than beyond, the bounds of human experience. While the Muggletonians likewise seek to bring God within the bounds of perception, they nevertheless highlight, rather than reject, the limitations on natural knowledge inscribed in enlightenment empiricism by both Hobbes and Bacon, equating sense perception with Mosaic Law and religious rituals, which have been superseded by the commission of the spirit. Muggleton’s affirmation of the limitations imposed on vision


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by reason is accomplished by contrasting his experience of spiritual vision with that of his philosophical and theological opponents who ‘are ignorant, and blind themselves in the knowledge of the true God’ (True Interpretation, p. vi). By claiming to have an expanded capacity of vision, Muggleton enables himself to ground his theology in the personal experience and observation of God. We can justly call Muggleton’s position ultra-empirical (as opposed to anti-empirical) in so far as he insists, first, that knowledge of God can only be attained through perception (albeit of a spiritual substance) and, secondly, that this spiritual perception can only be initiated via the introduction of divine discourse into temporal (i.e. everyday) experience. Moreover, as Hill notes, the perception of what we might call supernatural events would, for many people living in the seventeenth century, not have been divorced from the world of everyday experience (p. 87). Although Muggleton opposes reason with faith, and although he seems to suggest that the ‘seed of reason’ and the ‘seed of faith’ are something akin to what we might call genetic markers that enable or disable one’s capacity to perceive truth, he insists that ‘the assurance that a man’s name is not blotted out of the book of life, is when a man hath the witness in himself that his name is written in the book of life’ (True Interpretation, p. 8; emphasis added). This emphasis on the act of witnessing implies an active perception, as does the underlying metaphor of reading Christ’s name as it is written on one’s own heart. Muggleton describes two modes by which one can obtain this ‘witness’: ‘by voice from God, or some secret revelation, or by a steadfast faith in those messengers whom God doth send’ (pp. 7–8). While this implies a distinction between the knowledge of the prophets and that of their followers, both modes depend upon experience and observation. This is perhaps self-evident in instances of revelation, where the prophet perceives the voice of God either as an internal dialogue or as an ‘audible voice’ that breaks through the boundary between Eternity and fallen time. As in Blake’s texts, both Muggleton and Reeve suggest that the entrance of the divine voice into time initiates this opening of spiritual vision. Muggleton experiences this voice as an internal voice of faith, which he hears as a dialogue between faith and reason. Reeve, on the other hand, hears an external ‘Voice of Words’, which was audible ‘to the hearing of the Ear’.14 The case of witnessing by faith is somewhat more problematic, but Muggleton suggests an empirical component to the verification of the prophetic message through the use of sensation as a metaphor of spiritual recognition. He speaks in order ‘that the reader, the seed of faith, may see the difference between those messengers


that are not sent of God, and [. . .] those that are sent of God’, noting that ‘some have tasted of both, therefore they can tell best’ (True Interpretation, p. vi). In order to appreciate the demonstrative force of such doctrinal ‘tasting’, however, it is useful to return briefly to Hobbes. It is perhaps fitting that Reeve and Muggleton had their prophetic call to arms in 1652, the year after Leviathan appeared in England as both Hobbes and Muggleton seek, in different ways, to accomplish the same task, to raise man from a state of nature. While Hobbes depicts man’s natural state as a ‘Warre’ that renders his life ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (pp. 88–9), Muggleton writes, ‘men being in their state of nature, they are very dark in their minds concerning the knowledge of the true God, and the true spiritual worship, which God requires’ (True Interpretation, p. 39). Where they would seem to differ, however, is in the processes of improvement they propose: while Hobbes advocates the use of reason and an observation of the laws of nature, for Muggleton reason is the seducer which must be supplanted by prophetically inspired faith. Nevertheless, although the relation between Hobbes and Muggleton and Reeve is on some levels antithetical, there are overlaps in their theological positions. We have already seen that they agree roughly upon the limitations of natural reason, but the crossovers in their ideas about revelation also warrant further investigation. Despite claiming that one cannot be assured ‘of the Revelation of another, without a Revelation particularly to himselfe’, Hobbes nevertheless admits that ‘a man may be induced to believe such Revelation’ and he lists four ways in which public belief in a private revelation can be obtained: ‘from the Miracles they see him doe, or from seeing the Extraordinary sanctity of his life, or from seeing the Extraordinary wisedome, or Extraordinary felicity of his Actions’ (p. 198). Notably, Muggleton and Reeve deploy strategies very similar to those suggested by Hobbes when they call upon the faithful to believe, employing the tools of natural demonstration in their elucidation of the supernatural, providing accounts of themselves which speak to the miraculous, wise and felicitous aspects of their actions. Although A Divine Looking-Glass declares that their commission is ‘not accompanied with visible Signs, and natural Miracles’,15 Acts nevertheless presents detailed accounts of their ability to deploy the negative equivalent of the miracle, the curse, as an instrument of persuasion. Thompson comments in passing upon this alleged supernatural ability and Reay also remarks upon the importance of the curse within early Muggletonianism. He notes that ‘this power was not confined to the two prophets’ and that Muggleton considered


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it a sign of weak faith if a follower failed ‘to pass the sentence of damnation upon an obvious reprobate’. 16 He also suggests that cursing was an act with social significance: ‘[it] was the weapon of the poor and oppressed against the rich and powerful, and the Muggletonians must have derived satisfaction from damning oppressors and social superiors’ (ibid.). In addition to persuading (or otherwise silencing) the recipients of their curses, Muggleton and Reeve use the fact of the curses themselves as evidence of their divinely inspired power. In this way, therefore, Acts depicts the process of cursing in front of witnesses, and of cursing with effect, to draw the very personal and private act of revelation into a public space where it can be verified empirically by the community at large. The wisdom of the prophets, meanwhile, is demonstrated in the subsequent chapter of Acts, which provides an account of the difficult theological problems they have been posed, together with their divinely inspired solutions. This sense of spiritual wisdom is foregrounded in True Interpretation, where Muggleton claims that the truth of their revelation can be verified in their ability to solve the interpretative quandaries of the biblical text (p. vii). Moreover, in both Acts and True Interpretation this wisdom is represented as a source of personally verifiable satisfaction: ‘that minister that is not sent of God, his doctrine doth neither satisfy himself, nor him that receives him; this most people’s experience can witness unto’ (True Interpretation, p. vi). To this end, Muggleton represents his book itself as an instrument of felicity: ‘and happy will those be in whom it doth remain, and miserable will those be who despise and reject it’ (p. viii). Happiness thus becomes intertwined with knowledge and in particular with the ability to perform a felicitous exegesis that successfully removes contradiction and mystery from the biblical text. Perhaps surprisingly, Muggleton insists that this exegetical prowess is not only ‘the best and most profitable gift unto the seed of faith now-a-days’, but is in fact ‘more profitable to man than the scriptures themselves’ (p. 22). While Muggleton and Reeve probably did not set out to satisfy Hobbes’ criteria for determining the validity of private relation, the proximity of their acts to his list of proofs does point towards an underlying tradition common to both parties, the rational and the prophetic. The conjunction of exegesis, evangelism and the performance of extraordinary acts also shares a certain affinity with Locke’s ‘reasonable’ theology, which hinges upon three interrelated modes of conceiving the relation between word and meaning, appearance and essence, humanity and God. According to Locke, Christ’s appearance on earth


was made necessary because human beings had hitherto failed to correctly interpret the marks of divinity disseminated throughout the world of sense perception: Though the Works of Nature, in every Part of them, sufficiently evidence a Deity; yet the World made so little Use of their Reason, that they saw him not [. . .]. Sense and Lust blinded their Minds in some, and careless Inadvertency in others, and fearful Apprehensions in most [. . .] gave them up to into the Hands of their Priests, to fill their Heads with false Notions of the Deity, and their Worship with foolish Rites, as they pleased: And what Dread or Craft once began, Devotion soon made sacred, and Religion immutable [. . .]. And in the Crowd of wrong Notions, and invented Rites, the World had almost lost the Sight of the one only true God [. . .]. Hence we see that Reason, speaking ever so clearly to the Wise and Virtuous, had never Authority enough to prevail on the Multitude. (p. 530) In typical Lockean fashion, the failure of minds ‘blinded’ by sense, lust, carelessness and fear leads directly to enslavement as divine ‘Impressions’ are supplanted by priestly impositions. It is no accident that Locke employs visual metaphors of blindness and sight in his discussions of erroneous belief and enslavement, for in addition to their religious connotations these are experiential metaphors which allow a present act of perception – the very act of reading Locke’s text – to correct the obfuscated perception of the past. The experience of the present exerts a redemptive or messianic force onto the failings of the past: ‘the World had almost lost Sight’, but ‘hence we see’. We are not all that far from the commission of the spirit. Not only does this closeness belie the onto-theological grounding of Lockean empiricism, but it also points to an empirical impulse in anti-rational sects which stretches beyond the Muggletonians, through the radical civil war enthusiasts known collectively as the Ranters, and finds its way into the eighteenth-century theosophy and enthusiasm of, among others, the Moravians, Emanuel Swedenborg and Richard Brothers. Just as Blake, in All Religions, seeks not to reject but to expand the bounds of enlightenment empiricism by grafting the ‘faculty which experiences’ onto the ‘Spirit of Prophecy’ within his conception of the Poetic Genius (E1), so too Muggleton seeks to provide an expansion of sense that not only anticipates Blake, but also shares certain structural affinities with Locke’s definition of revelation as an enlargement of reason. Although Muggleton clearly prioritises the eye of faith over the eye of reason, this


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preference is grounded in a belief that the latter opens the way for new spiritual discoveries. Whereas Hobbes confines himself to the observation of natural substances, the Muggletonians, though not denying the existence of matter as Berkeley will do, insist that scripture can only be properly understood by an interpreter who, quite literally, has one eye cast on the spiritual substance to which the Bible’s natural or material letters refer. Muggletonian revelation can, in this respect, be considered as Hobbesian materialism printed in relief, raising to prominence the supernatural sense that Hobbes prefers to leave in the background. Casting aspersion on contemporary claims to supernatural sense, the Hobbesian materialist and Lockean empiricist both shut their eyes on the ‘real spiritual substance’ that Muggleton calls on the faithful to witness (True Interpretation, p. 36). This refusal to see involves a certain self-deception, a sleight of hand. On the one hand, a certain type of event, the miraculous or prophetic, is treated as highly unlikely or even downright impossible, but on the other hand, and at the same time, it is admitted that such events are not only possible, but have historical precedent. This foreclosure of the possible, of the reappearance of the messianic within the present age, is precisely the sort of ‘dull round’ that Blake identifies as the problem in enlightenment empiricism and, moreover, it is a denial of vision that is made on religious grounds, on the belief in a God whose face cannot be directly perceived by the senses. In a manner that anticipates Blake’s declaration concerning ‘the doors of perception’ (The Marriage, 14; E39), Muggleton conceives of the messianic event arriving into the world of experience through a ‘door’ which provides immediate access to God’s ‘heavenly palace’: Christ is called a door himself, and he hath the key of David, who openeth and no man shutteth. And this is he that opened the door of John’s understanding, and let him see in a vision the glory of heaven. (True Interpretation, p. 21) The substantiality of this door is a point Muggleton reinforces repeatedly, insisting that it ‘may be seen, felt, and understood by the eye of faith, as the other [the door of an earthly palace] is by the eye of reason’ (ibid.). The commission of the spirit, which has as its harbingers Muggleton and Reeve themselves, is a time of unfolding mysteries, of revealing the secret which was hid, of giving assurance to the believer that his or her name remains in the book of life (pp. 7–8). Salvation itself is directly tied to a belief in, and concomitant vision of, the body of God, for none can believe who do not see. This body, moreover, is corporeal, a human


body capable of injury and suffering, for ‘neither can any thing cleanse and purge the conscience of man from the guilt of sin, and fear of eternal death, but the blood of a God’ (p. 3). Muggleton goes beyond the materialism advocated by Hobbes and later by Priestley (who, it must be recalled, invokes his materialist precursor by name), insisting that every spirit or soul, including God, must be contained within a definite form and ‘the eye of faith doth as perfectly see God their king sitting upon his throne in the kingdom of glory above the stars’ (p. 12). Whilst God at creation had a body comprised of ‘a spiritual substance clear as chrystal, and as I may say, swifter than thought, brighter than the sun’, when he incarnates himself as Christ he assumes a body of flesh and blood: And this word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and this was Christ, which is the word of God, which is God, and is in heaven in that very same flesh, which the eternal spiritual body became, and suffer’d death in. (p. 2) The incarnation entails not only the personalisation and rendering visible of the absolute other, but the bloody death and suffering at the heart of the mysterium tremendum entails a familiarisation of the other, a humanisation that places the deity on the same level of being as every other at the same time retaining the fullness of divinity, ‘Christ is God, and Christ he died, therefore God did die’ (p. 14). Though God is venerated as a king, the true believer, whose expanded vision allows a vision of the body and belief in the corpse, will join Christ on his throne, ‘that is, he shall sit with Christ, or be with Christ in the kingdom of eternal glory’ (p. 9). Redemption is made possible through a being capable not of giving itself death, but of allowing itself to be put to death by another: Neither could God have redeemed mankind to an eternal happiness, but by his becoming flesh. Neither could any serpent or devil have put God to death, if God had not took upon him the nature of a man. For the nature of a man cloathes itself with flesh, blood and bone, and so is made capable to be put to death by the seed and nature of reason; which is the serpent, or devil. (p. 13) The ultimate gift of death is not a suicide. It is not a mercy killing. It is a murder. And the murder is not laid at the feet of some supernatural


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demon, but of human beings, for ‘there is no devil but men and women’ (p. v), those whose souls have been misled by the false light of reason, which as we know is a light of abstraction, of spiritual disembodiment. The blood of the deity, however, brings not terror and trembling in the face of absolute inscrutability, but ‘peace, joy, life, and salvation [. . .] and these are better things than the blood of Abel, or the blood of the saints; which speaketh to the soul of fear, horror, death, and eternal damnation’ (p. 45). Just as the materialist Hobbes depicts prophecy as a patently unreliable form of knowledge acquisition, so the self-declared prophets of the third commission present the observation of natural or outward forms as a mode of understanding, interpreting and worshipping God and scripture that has become outdated. However, this supersession is best viewed not as a rejection of enlightenment empiricism in toto, but rather as an alternative reading of this as yet incipient epistemology. Muggletonian doctrine presents experience as the primary mode of knowledge acquisition, but its idea of vision entails an expansion of man’s perceptive capabilities. This occurs in four interrelated ways: through the empirical demonstration of prophetic power; through the introduction of divine discourse into the temporal world; through the description of a spiritual substance open to perception; and through the vision of God’s body itself, in life and in death. There are undeniably many antecedents to Blake in Muggletonian doctrine. The expansion of the bounds of the known, the unfolding of mystery, the rejection of reason in favour of spiritual experience, these are all Blakean themes and give voice to ideas he too venerates.

The abyssal eye Despite the rupturing of the direct line of inheritance that Thompson envisioned between Blake and the Muggletonians, there are marks of a shared tradition of openness to alterity, which feeds into what I have been calling visionary materialism and which descends in part through their mutual forebear, Jacob Boehme. Although Boehme accords divine mystery a prominent place in his theosophic system, representing God as a being ‘whose Ground we must not know’, the primal urge of the deity is to render itself manifest by entering into a relationship with itself and thus opening a space for alterity (‘Signatura Rerum’, Works, IV, p. 17) . Moreover, this inchoate desire, this being that longs to show itself, is also a longing for vision, for the obtainment of something to see: ‘an Eye of Eternity, an abyssal Eye’ (ibid.). Boehme attempts to


teach us how to perceive God, whose act of creation is an act of embodiment, a corporealisation which renders the invisible visible and he equates the onto-theological ground of existence itself, that which exists ‘in the Nothing’, with the act of infinite perception. Although the divine power of existence/perception is at first a ‘Mystery’, it is motivated, quite literally, by a desire for incarnation. This longing represents the second person of what Boehme emphasises is a triune God: Christ, the son who is joy or, more accurately, the desire for joyful creation. In order to ‘discern’ the divine ‘Being in Nature’, Boehme insists that one must ‘pray to God for the Holy Spirit, to enlighten thee’ (‘Aurora’, Works, I, p. 28). The perception of the divine depends not upon rational enlightenment, but rather upon the Enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. Significantly, Boehme conceptualises this spirit in terms that resemble Blake’s descriptions of the Poetic Genius. As we have seen, in All Religions the Poetic Genius is not only the source of ‘the body or outward form of Man’ and of ‘The Jewish & Christian Testaments’, but it is also the source of philosophy, prophecy and indeed all acts of discovery (E1). Similarly, Boehme’s Holy Spirit is the source not only of life, but also of prophetic and exegetical ability: Even as the Spirit of Man rules and reigns in the whole Body in all the Veins, and replenishes the whole Man; even so the Holy Ghost replenishes the whole Nature, and is the Heart of the good Qualities of every Thing. If thou has that Spirit in thee, so that it enlightens, fills, and replenishes thy Spirit, then thou wilt understand what follows in this Writing. But if not, then it will be with thee, as it was with the wise Heathens, who gazed on the Creation, and would search and sift it out by their own Reason; and though with their Fictions and Conceits they came before God’s Countenance or Face, yet they were not able to see it, but were stark blind in the Knowledge of God. (Ibid.) Notably, Boehme conflates knowledge and perception in such a way as to suggest that the understanding of his text is an act akin to beholding the divine countenance. Put differently, the text presents its reader with the face of God, but this can only be perceived by means of a spiritual and fundamentally irrational light: ‘we do not go upon an historical heathenish Conjecture, nor only upon the Light of the outward Nature; both Suns shine to us’ (‘Signatura Rerum’, p. 168).


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As in The Marriage, Boehme’s cosmogony depicts creation as the product of contrary qualities or elements, such as light and heat. Although these qualities can be divided into ‘a Good one and an Evil one’, Boehme tells us that ‘no Creature in the Flesh [. . .] can subsist, unless it contains the Two Qualities’ (‘Aurora’, p. 23). The initial contrary is between the ‘dark fire’ and the ‘light world’. Heat contains both of these: the light which is ‘the Heart of Heat’, ‘a Power of Life’, ‘a Source [. . .] of Joy’, and ‘a Fierceness or Wrath which [. . .] springs, drives, and elevates itself in the Light, and makes the Light moveable’ (pp. 23, 24). Aubrey notes that ‘these two qualities [light and darkness] cannot be thought of merely as good and evil. The dark qualities are the source, not only of the wrath, but of all life’ (p. 44). This divine power of creation exists in three worlds or states: in the source who is the Father, in which there is light without heat; in the son, who is the ‘cause of joy’; and in the Holy Spirit, which is the ‘moving Spring or Fountain of Joy’ (pp. 34, 36). Raine provides a convincing argument for regarding Boehme’s theosophy as a source of Blake’s doctrine of contraries and she explicitly connects Boehme with The Marriage, plate 3 (Raine, I, p. 363). In particular, she notes that while the doctrine of contraries was common among alchemists, Boehme’s teachings most closely anticipate Blake’s in that he adapts alchemical principles to a system in which the contraries represent ‘good and evil, heaven and hell’ (I, p. 361). Additionally, she notes that Boehme, like Blake, refers to the fires of hell as ‘evil or energy’, suggesting that ‘without this energy there is no life possible’ (ibid., p. 363). Edward Taylor’s earlier abridged edition of Boehme’s works provides an additional elucidation of the similarities between Blakean and Behmenist contraries: without strife, springs no production; and without contraries, is no strife. The two Principles of Light and Darkness cannot be said to have beginning, but are coeternal; yet one (the Light) swalloweth up the other as the day doth the night.17 The resemblance in both sense and syntax between the first sentence of this passage and Blake’s declaration on The Marriage, plate 3 (E34), that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ is suggestive as is the association of one contrary with Love and the other with Anger, which seems to anticipate Blake’s descriptions of the contraries of ‘Love and Hate’ (ibid.).


The likelihood that Blake had Boehme in mind during the composition of The Marriage, plate 3, is strengthened by the sardonic reference to Swedenborg on that plate: ‘And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb’ (ibid.). Although in the final ordering of the text, this is the first time Swedenborg is mentioned, the production history posited by Viscomi suggests that this plate was produced after plates 21–4,18 in which Blake explicitly links Swedenborg with Boehme: ‘Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s’ (22; E43). The fact that Blake associates Swedenborg with Boehme at the earliest stage of production seems significant. Viscomi presents a convincing argument for believing that Blake intended to print plates 21–4 as an independent pamphlet which would ‘undermine Swedenborg’s credibility and [. . .] champion Blake and his positions’ (‘The Evolution of The Marriage’, p. 298). The incorporation of Boehme within this attack indicates an awareness of Boehme’s doctrines in which the Teutonic theosopher is depicted as one of several sources recapitulated by the Swedish writer. As Viscomi notes, the ‘perfunctory mention of Swedenborg [on plate 3] appears to rely on information already provided, compositionally speaking [by plates 21–4]’ (ibid., p. 285); given that this background information connects Swedenborg with Boehme, it seems likely that the echoes of Boehme that follow the reference to Swedenborg on plate 3 are not merely coincidental. The only other place where Swedenborg appears by name is in the ‘Memorable Fancy’ on plates 17–20 (Swedenborg is named on plate 19). As with the naming of Swedenborg on plate 3, this occurrence also coincides with Blake’s incorporation of Behmenist imagery – in this case, ‘the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city’ (18; E41). These incidents indicate that throughout The Marriage, Blake’s attacks on Swedenborg are defined in part by turning their shared Behmenist inheritance against him. Blake clearly views himself as the better student of Boehme and nowhere is this clearer than in the belief in, as Aubrey notes, their shared sense of a world beyond ‘the moral categories of good and evil’, for this is ‘a step which had never occurred to Swedenborg’ (p. 43). Of particular relevance to the present discussion are the ways in which Boehme seeks to infuse the material world with a vision of spiritual energy. Aubrey provides a good summary of this Behmenist vision: what Blake did find in Boehme, and what is absent [. . .] from Swedenborg, is the alchemical vision of nature as a vast, seething receptacle for the refinement and spiritualization of matter, an


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alchemical retort no less, and Blake certainly reacts as an alchemist when he implies that Swedenborg’s writings can be placed in the same category as ‘Aristotle’s Analytics’. (p. 48) Boehme provides yet another model of the prophet or seer as a person of expanded vision, capable of perceiving ‘all the great movements and counter-movements in creation at work within a single moment’ (Aubrey, p. 89). Moreover, it is here too that Boehme displays a pre-enlightenment preference for experience and experiment over abstract reasoning. Blake’s ‘alchemical retort’, as Aubrey remarks, comes from a tendency ‘for Hermetic philosophers to dismiss Aristotle and the schoolmen with contempt, supposing that they studied books too much and nature too little’ (p. 48). Nevertheless, the presence of Behmenist ideas within The Marriage in general, and within Blake’s discussion of contraries in particular, need not exclude the possibility of Priestley’s concomitant influence, especially given Blake’s position at a juncture where occult theosophy intersects with empirical philosophy. There is no reason to suppose that Blake’s idea of the progression of contraries cannot include elements from both Boehme and Priestley – after all, Blake’s list of contraries includes both ‘Love and Hate’ and ‘Attraction and Repulsion’. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that the plates composed in the initial stage of production carry an implicit reference to Priestley in addition to the explicit association of Swedenborg with Boehme. Viscomi notes that the ‘Memorable Fancy’ presented on plates 22–4 continues the attack on Swedenborg of plates 21–2, ‘in that it sets forth through the two parties the arguments for and against Swedenborg’s idea of God, the central issue dividing the two visionaries [i.e. Blake and Swedenborg]’ (‘The Evolution of The Marriage’, p. 299). As Viscomi reports, ‘the devil’, who presents Blake’s perspective, ‘wins the debate, as is evinced by the angel’s conversion’ (ibid.). However, as Gleckner points out, the process prior to conversion – in which the Angel ‘became almost blue but mastering himself he grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling’ (23; E43) – reproduces in reverse order Priestley’s description of the changes in colour observable in steel during tempering.19 Even if Priestley’s influence on The Marriage was more diffuse than Gleckner suggests, his system of materialism and Boehme’s ideas about productive contrariety ought not to be considered mutually exclusive forces within Blake’s intellectual inheritance. Raine notes that Boehme conceives the unity of God and nature as the relationship between body and soul, with nature providing the divine body and the Son constituting


the divine heart or soul. This leads her to conclude that ‘we must beware of supposing that when Blake declares that energy is “from the Body” he attaches the same meaning to the words as would a materialist’ (I, p. 364). While Raine does not explicitly define what she means by ‘materialist’ and while she does not describe what kind of materialism we must beware of ascribing to Blake, her comment that ‘the real existing principle [for Blake] is not matter but life’ seems to suggest a vision of materialism as that which is preoccupied with lifeless form rather than living energy (ibid.). However, this conceptualisation of materialism is at odds with a system such as Priestley’s, with its sense of divine immanence and its supposition that matter is itself constituted by contrary powers or energies. In its Priestleyan formulation, then, materialism is not that far removed from Boehme’s conception of the divine contraries, light and wrath, nor from his emphasis on divine corporeality, a proximity of which both Blake and Priestley were likely aware. Both anticipate Blake’s depiction of productive contrariety and both privilege energy and dynamism over obfuscation and stasis. Boehme also shares with Priestley (and Hobbes) a belief in the resurrection of the whole man, in both body and soul. Although Boehme insists that nature ‘shall be changed at the End of this Time’ and although he declares that ‘Good and Evil shall be separated’ (‘Aurora’, p. 28), his descriptions of the resurrection stress the continued and Eternal significance of contraries such as light and heat, love and wrath, body and soul. Although the light can be viewed as Good and the heat as Evil, both these natural contraries originate in a single source (p. 31). Notably, in his elucidation of this apparent paradox, Boehme directs our gaze towards the human body and, indeed, towards that body in its lapsarian condition: Behold, there is a Gall in Man’s Body, which is Poison, and he cannot live without this Gall; for the Gall makes the Astral Spirits moveable, joyous, triumphing or laughing, for it is the Source of Joy. But if it is inflamed or kindled in one of the Elements, then it spoils the whole Man, for the Wrath in the Astral Spirits comes from the Gall. [. . .]. And such a Source has Joy, and from the same Substance as the Wrath. (Ibid.) While there is no wrath in God, ‘if God should be angry in Himself, then the whole Nature would be on fire’ (p. 32), to the fallen mind God


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appears wrathful and vengeful because it has succumbed to the erroneous division of the eternal world into the categories of Good and Evil: The divine Light and Love were extinguished in Adam, because he imagined into the Serpent’s Property, viz. into Evil and Good, so that [. . .] the Source of Anger was inflamed [. . .] and [. . .] His Body [. . .] was an Enmity against God. (‘Signatura Rerum’, p. 69) The cure for this ailment is not from outside the human body and it does not involve removing the source of wrath, which is necessary for life itself. Redeemed humanity contains the light of understanding, the divine fire and the light of love within a body that is still recognisably human. Even in our ‘heavenly Corporality’, Boehme insists, we will retain our human form, ‘else we must assume to us another Image or Shape in the Resurrection, which would be contrary to the first Creation’ (I, p. 45). In a certain sense, Boehme takes his emphasis on corporeality even further than Priestley does. While Priestley insists that the materiality of human beings cannot be extended to God, Boehme, like Muggleton and Swedenborg after him, conceives God as bearing a corporeal likeness to both men and angels: BEHOLD! as the Being in God is, so is the Being also in Man and Angels; and as the Divine Body is, so is also the Angelical and human Body or Corporeity. (‘Aurora’, p. 51) Thus, Boehme extends the similitude of God and man to include both body and essence, ‘Being’ and ‘Corporeity’. Indeed, for Boehme, as for Muggleton and Reeve, the human body provides the model by which to explain God’s relationship to the universe: Take Man for a Similitude or Example, who is made after the Image or Similitude of God, as it is written. The Interior, or Hollowness in the Body of Man, is, and signifies the Deep betwixt the Stars and the Earth. The whole Body with all its Parts signifies Heaven and Earth. (‘Aurora’, p. 29) Blake’s comments on the human aspect of divine embodiment suggest an affinity with this strand of Behmenist thought, though Boehme’s commitment to this idea concentrates on allegory and similitude.


This affinity is particularly evident in the early tractates and The Marriage, where Blake represents the divine as existing within ‘The true Man’ or ‘existing beings or Men’ (All Religions; The Marriage, 16; E2, 40). However, Boehme’s text introduces a distinction between the human and the divine, which is absent from, or at least de-emphasised in, Blake’s texts. While the being and body of the human being corresponds exactly with essence and corporeality of the divine, there remains an important difference: Man is a Creature, and not the whole Being, but a Son of the whole Being, whom the whole Being has generated: And therefore it is fit that it should be in Subjection to the whole Being, seeing it is the Son of its Body. (‘Aurora’, p. 51) By establishing an ontological hierarchy in which human beings are inherently inferior to God, Boehme introduces the concept of human ‘Subjection’. The subjugation of creation to creator is made explicit in ‘Three Principles’, where Boehme pronounces that ‘God rules all in all incomprehensibly and imperceptibly to the Creature’ (Works, I, p. 86). Moreover, although Boehme stresses the significance of divine embodiment, he maintains that God’s manifestation in nature is motivated by ‘a Desire after Virtue and Power’ and he describes the ‘Ground’ of the ‘Deity’ as that which ‘we must not know’ (‘Signatura Rerum’, p. 17; emphasis added). Thus, although Boehme posits an essential and corporeal likeness between the human and the divine and although he promises to ‘shew [us] the Arcanum of the greatest secret Mystery’ (ibid., p. 17), he, like Priestley, would seem to limit human understanding to a perception of effects rather than causes. Just as the congeniality between Priestley’s materialism and Blake’s anti-dualism does not imply that The Marriage is a straightforward reiteration of Priestley’s system, so too the similarities between Blake and Boehme do not indicate a complete and unquestioning embrace of Behmenist doctrine. Blake is tempered and shaped by the prophetic and philosophical utterances of these precursors, but at the same time his embrace itself tempers and moulds the words and ideas he borrows, fitting them to new contexts and positions within his own poetic productions. Blake’s deployment of Behmenist ideas and his reference to Boehme in The Marriage suggest an ambivalent, if not unduly critical response. The association of Boehme with Swedenborg is itself somewhat incriminating. Blake does not specify which parts of Swedenborg’s inheritance are ‘superficial’ and which are ‘sublime’ (22; E43), but he


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does criticise Swedenborg for conversing only ‘with Angels’ (ibid.). In view of this, the fact that Blake depicts the ‘infinite Abyss’ as part of an angelic perception of Eternity, which is superseded by his own ‘pleasant’ vision, may implicate Boehme within Swedenborg’s angelic partisanship. In any case, Blake seems to imply that the spiritual productivity of Boehme’s theosophy is finite, unlike the literary and poetic texts of Dante and Shakespeare: ‘Any man [. ..] may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s. and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number’ (ibid.; emphasis added). If Blake is indeed paying a complement to Boehme, his positive evaluation of Behmenism is expressed in relation to his negative assessment of Swedenborg rather than as an objective declaration of spiritual worth. At the juncture of several seemingly disjunct traditions – Hobbesian materialism, Lockean empiricism, Protestant antinomianism, Muggletonian evangelism and Behmenist theosophy – we can trace an alternative reading of Blake’s inheritance, one that emphasises points of intersection between discourses of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘counter-enlightenment’. This is not to suggest that Blake himself was consciously attempting to fuse or combine these discourses – though he certainly appears to have been conscious of carving out a middle ground between, for example, Boehme and Locke. What we must keep in mind, however, is that dichotomies such as those between the rational and the irrational, between empiricism and idealism, oppositions that structure texts such as No Natural Religion and The Marriage, are far less rigid than has often been supposed. Indeed, from at least the mid-seventeenth century through to the early nineteenth century, writers such as Blake, and he is by no means unique in this respect, are able to situate themselves – not comfortably, but adamantly – in the midst of such binaries, seeking to access a divine vision through sensory perception whilst transgressing the boundaries of Lockean empiricism, working to combine the most recent discoveries in science with the most arcane theosophical speculation in order to produce a vision that is both finely tuned and politically relevant.

4 The Opening Eye

I was in a Vision, Having the Angel of God near me, and saw Satan walking leisurely into London; his face had a smile, but under it his looks were sly, crafty, and deceitful. On the right side of his forehead were seven dark spots; he was dressed in White and Scarlet Robes. – Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies & Times1 I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning: [.. .]. Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods. And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, &conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions. – William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (21–2; E42–3) The eruption of a certain mode of orgiastic or demonic consciousness that accompanies the unfolding mystery, the making public of the Father’s secret self, involves a return to a certain vision or image of the body. When Colebrook remarks on the sense, shared by Derrida and Blake, that ‘there is no ground, totality, community or consensus prior to figuration’ (p. 26), we can hear an echo of Moravian Christocentricism, of Christ as ‘the Ground and Foundation of the spiritual Building’.2 The figure of Christ, of his suffering and his death in the flesh, redeems religion and morality from the ‘Heathenish Manner’ that motions 100

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towards an invisible God and fails to ‘point out that God in the Face of Christ’ (ibid.). In this heathenish error we can perhaps perceive the spectre of Platonism against which Priestley also warns us, though to different effect,3 as we can in the belief in disembodied souls, of a spirit as ‘a breath of wind’, which Swedenborg likewise dismisses.4 This return to form, this becoming flesh of the absolute other, calls us towards a new understanding of responsibility and obedience to the law, which is not – as it is when the visor-effect comes into play – that ‘essentially blind submission’ of which Derrida speaks (Specters, p. 7). From this variant perspective, ‘the highest Art of Moralizing’ would therefore consist not in reasoning on the dictates of an invisible other, but in the recognition of a visible body: In the Glorifying of the Wounds of Jesus, which got us the Privilege to be holy before the Eyes of the holy God; and to sympathize with his spiritual Law, or the Mind of Christ. (An Account, p. 53) No longer a prison or impediment to vision, the body thus becomes that which not only transforms our appearance before the eyes of the other, but also allows us to sympathise with the other’s mind. The injunction of the law no longer requires obedience based on blind faith, but an act of understanding: ‘What is faith but truth? where is truth in its own light but in the understanding?’ (NJM, I, p. 77). The blood theology of the Moravians provides an important junction in the movement of the open-mystery, connecting earlier Behmenist and Kabbalistic teachings and practices directly to Blake and his spiritual progenitor (and friendly enemy) Swedenborg. Archival evidence suggests that Blake’s grandparents, as well as the parents of his future business partner James Parker, may have been the founding members of The Congregation of the Lamb, the Moravian group that worshipped in Fetter Lane and it now seems likely that both of Blake’s parents also worshipped there (Schuchard and Davies, p. 38). Of particular note are letters, uncovered by Schuchard, from Blake’s mother, Catherine, her first husband, Thomas Armitage, and a John Blake, petitioning for admittance to the Congregation. ‘I have very littell to say of my self’, Blake’s mother writes: for I am a pore crature and full of wants but my Dear Saviour will satisfy them all I should be glad if I could allways lay at the Cross full as I do know thanks be to him last Friday at the love feast Our Savour was pleased to make me Suck his wounds and hug the Cross more than Ever and I trust will more and more till my fraile nature can hould


no more at your request I have rit but I am not worthy of the blessing it is desird for I do not Love our Dear Savour halfe enough. (Catherine Armitage [November 1750]; quoted in Schuchard and Davies, p. 40) The relationship that is here enacted between self and other, believer and Christ, is striking in its dependence on the highly eroticised figure of Christ. The saviour, Catherine maintains, will satisfy her ‘wants’ – a term conflating sexual desire with a sense of spiritual lacking – by making her engage in the visceral act of sucking ‘his wounds [. . .] till my fraile nature can hould no more’. Such imagery is in accordance with teachings of the Moravian leader, Count Zinzendorf, who in 1743 ‘ushered in the “Sifting Period” in the Moravian congregation’, seeking ‘to counter their commitment to celibacy with a more joyful attitude to human and divine sexuality’.5 As Schuchard and Davies note, ‘Zinzendorf’s daring experiments in poetic imagery’ include ‘obsessively graphic depictions of Jesus’ battered body, with glorification of his circumcised penis and vaginal side-wound’ (Schuchard and Davies, II, §33). Moreover, this emphasis on a guttural sensuality coincides with a glorification of the human body that contains not only strong traces of antinomianism, but also an insistence that the genitals of both sexes, which had been rendered shameful by the fall, were through Christ redeemed and transformed into a fit place for worship (Schuchard, ‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’, p. 50). Schuchard and Davies detail several intersections between the eroticism of the Moravians and Blake’s own thoughts on sexuality and desire, suggesting a high degree of influence. Of especial relevance to the present discussion are the ways in which Moravian ideas about the experience of God anticipate the conjunction of theological, ontological and epistemological ideas that make up Blake’s own visionary materialism. Although the Moravian connection seems to eclipse Thompson’s Muggletonian hypothesis, the Fetter Lane Congregation, particularly during the Sifting Period, represents an important point of continuity, keeping alive a similar interest in both the body and the blood of God. ‘I say may that blood which me Clense and make me one of those that can Rejoyce in hiss wounds’, writes John Blake, who Schuchard and Davies suggest may have been Blake’s uncle or great-uncle, ‘and may his Death and Suffring be the only thing, the one thing neefull for me, to make me happy’ (John Blake to Peter Böler; quoted in Schuchard and Davies, p. 39). Similarly, Thomas Armitage writes to the Congregation: My Dear Saviour has maid me Love you in Such a degree, as I never did Experience before to any Set of People; and I believe it is his will

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that I should come amongst you; because he has done it himself, for I could not bear the Doctrine of his Bloody Corps, till; very lately, till non but my Dr Saviour could show me; perfectly, & he over came me so sweetly that I shall never forget [. ..] & my Jesus Show’d me that I had been seeking something else besides him, nor could I then bear the thought of hearing anything Else; but of him being Crucified & of his Bleeding wounds, which I Experienced very Sweet & the only food for my Soul then; I am but very poor in my Self & weak and find my Love very cool sometime toward him [. . .] but when my Loveing Saviour comes again and kindles that Spark, then I feel I can love him dearly; so he makes me love him. (Thomas Armitage to Brother West, 14 November 1750; quoted in Schuchard and Davies, p. 40) Armitage clearly articulates a belief in both divine immanence and intervention, for Christ moves amongst the brethren and ‘makes’ Armitage love them through his presence in them. Moreover, his experience of faith, like his wife’s, is sensual. Not only does Christ show him things – the error of his ways, the crucifixion – but these sights and sounds are ‘Experienced very Sweet’ and become ‘food for my Soul’. Armitage, in keeping with the Moravian emphasis on humility, declares his weakness in the face of God, but there is little to no trace of selftrembling, ‘I know he Loves me with that ever lasting Love, that nothing shall separate us, as St Paul sais’ (ibid.). Armitage’s sense of his own weakness, his moral failings, revolves around the question of caritas and it is not surprising therefore to find him invoking Paul. Borrowing his widow’s phrase, we might say that he wants love. There is no room for mystery or secrecy here. Christ knows this want, he can see the love cooling, even as Thomas can ‘feel’ his saviour’s forgiveness and unbounded love. There is a certain sense here not of non-reciprocity exactly, but of an insufficient return. Thomas does not have enough love to equal the love Christ shows him. He is the lesser friend, lesser lover, but this is precisely why he needs Christ to complete him. Discussing the imbrication of friendship and justice in Aristotle, Derrida remarks that the act of love, the active love, precedes the state of loving and cannot occur without the lover’s knowledge. On the other hand, ‘one can be loved while remaining ignorant of that very thing – that one is loved – and in this respect remain as though confined to secrecy’ (Politics, p. 9). This accords well with the experience of the believer who discovers the love of Christ, who is let into or out of the secret that he or she has been loved since before time and is therefore enabled to experience love as an active participant, to have her or his love kindled,


even if it must always fall short of the mark. However, the placement, in Derrida’s extrapolation of Aristotle, of the ‘Prime Mover’ on the side of the beloved, the passive recipient who is at the same time ‘pure Act’, belies not only a certain paradox but also a certain will to secrecy on the part of the other, of God. One cannot say, for example, in the case of Thomas Armitage that ‘being loved therefore remains [. . .] an accident’, nor that ‘Loving will always be preferable to being-loved, as acting is preferable to suffering, act to potentiality, essence to accident, knowledge to non-knowledge’ (Politics, pp. 9, 11). Thomas’s very existence, his essence, depends upon being-loved and his own love is itself enflamed, initiated and sustained by the knowledge that he is beloved. Moreover, this knowledge itself, this spur into act, comes about precisely because the other has made himself visible through a vision of divine and incommensurable suffering: ‘Therefore, by the Preaching of Christ, shall and must the Light of the Knowlege [sic] of the Glory of God be displayed, in the Face of Jesus Christ’ (Account, p. 25). It is the other within that ‘makes’ Thomas love, but it is only by distinguishing the other, by recognising his absolute exteriority at the very moment of interpenetration, of a highly eroticised intercourse, that his own heart can be jolted into action. Once again, a vision of the divine body is central to the interiorisation of light, and Schuchard and Davies note Zinzendorf’s utter rejection of an invisible God as well as the long hours spent ‘in meditation aimed at visualising the complete physiology and physiognomy of Christ’ (Schuchard and Davies, II, §40).6 Recalling Connolly’s comments on the prominence of nerves and veins in eighteenth-century thoughts on sympathy together with her subsequent suggestion that ‘Blake asserts that sympathy is possible by inviting his audience to view the interiors of his fleshy mental personifications [through his graphic art]’ (p. 64), the corporeality of Christ with his open wounds acquires an added significance. It is an act of sympathising that brings the self an understanding of, and an accordance with, the spiritual law or mind of Christ and this sympathy itself can only be awoken by the sight or art of suffering and death. The Moravians, like the Muggletonians (and also like the materialists Hobbes and Priestley), believe adamantly in the resurrection of the whole Body: the Resurrection of the Saviour with his intire Body is expressly alleged in the Scripture as the Fore-runner of ours, Himself being stiled the First-born from the Dead: It is for His sake, that we rejoice very much in this glorious Destiny of our Corpse; and, in order to shew in public our most explicit Faith in that Matter, and the Credit

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his Promises have with us, the Burying places become pleasant Gardens to our Citizens; and the Visit we pay to the yearly-deposited Bones of our Fellow-Members, in the very Morning of Easter, is a simple Act in Consequence thereof. (An Account, p. 100) The empirical fact of Christ’s death, the vision of his corpse, thus becomes central to the ‘Credit’ given to the promise of redemption. There is an economy of sacrifice at work here, but it is not conducted behind closed doors. Faith is here made explicit and the decomposing bodies of the deceased themselves mark out the site for its public display.

‘He conversed with Angels’ ‘I have frequently been present at the conversation of angels with novitiate spirits’, we read in one of Swedenborg’s many ‘memorable relations’, ‘and once I heard them discoursing on the consummation of the age and the destruction of the world’ (NJR, I, p. 76). In The Marriage, as we have seen, Blake’s comments on the apocalypse suggest not an annihilation of the material world as such, but rather ‘an improvement of sensual enjoyment’ (14; E39). This may well be something he picks up from Swedenborg whose angels dismiss the novitiates’ theories of an apocalypse brought about through an explosion of the sun, eruption of volcanoes or impact of a comet, pointing out instead that biblical representations of the Apocalypse are meant to be taken in a spiritual rather than a natural sense. In particular, the angels set out to demonstrate that the spiritual world is itself as real and substantial as the natural one: Ye are now in the spiritual world, and yet ye do not know but that you are still in the natural world; Here, the heaven where angels are is over your head, and hell where devils and satans are, is under feet: Is not the ground whereon we all stand, earth? strike it with your feet and try. (Ibid., pp. 77–8) One is perhaps reminded of Dr Johnson who, as the story goes, refuted Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a stone. Nevertheless, Swedenborg, unlike Johnson, is concerned with demonstrating the objective existence of spiritual reality rather than the natural world, and the pragmatic demonstrations of his angels can indeed come across sounding alternately self-righteous and naïve. That said, his memorable relations represent


a convergence of theosophical elements from the Kabbalah, Boehme and Moravianism together with a miscellany of other ideas that he picked up through association with the freemasons. Of particular interest is his commitment to the idea of spiritual form, which itself would seem to resemble the Muggletonian idea of the ‘spiritual substance’, and to the notion that ‘the Deity, or Divine Nature, as constituting heaven, is also in a Human Form: and that such Human Form is the Divine Humanity of the Lord’.7 Blake’s extensive annotations of Swedenborg’s Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell, The Wisdom of Angels, Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom and The Wisdom of Angels Concerning the Divine Providence provide evidence of a detailed dialogue with the mystic, which begins in friendship and develops into the most fervent opposition. Of particular import is the impact of empiricism on Swedenborg, himself an erstwhile student of Locke, and the ways in which his ideas about spiritual form and the relation between the natural and the spiritual worlds inform Blake’s own thinking in this area. Despite the fact that Swedenborg ‘only holds a candle in [Boehme’s] sunshine’ (The Marriage, 22; E43), he did have one thing that set him above his theosophical predecessor: he at least ‘conversed with’ rather than speculated about ‘Angels’ (ibid.). And this conversation signalled an empirical interaction with a portion of the divine, albeit with a portion against which Blake often directed his own wrath and derision. Swedenborg also represents the most definite crossover between theosophy and rational empiricism, for in addition to his mystical speculations he was also an avid scientist and inventor famous for his anticipation of ‘many subsequent hypotheses and discoveries (nebular theory, magnetic theory, machine-gun, aeroplane)’.8 Even within his mystical writings, one finds a great emphasis on the power of experience and literal observation. Thus, the full title of Heaven and Hell, ‘A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell, and of the Wonderful Things therein, as Heard and Seen’, presents the text as a description of personal experience and claims for itself an empirical authority. However, Swedenborg is careful to point out that the ability to perceive angels depends upon exercising an additional faculty of sensation and, echoing Locke directly, he represents ‘the material eye’ as ‘so gross, that it cannot discern the more minute parts of nature [. . .] much less those things which are [. . .] in the spiritual world’ (ibid.). But in contrast to Locke – and Priestley as well – Swedenborg sets himself up as one who has had his spiritual eye opened and can therefore perceive spiritual objects ‘as if [. . .] with his bodily eyes’ (§76).

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Swedenborg’s programme is, in certain respects, one of demystification of the divine realm. Not only does the divine humanity provide a figure through which to relate to the deity, but Swedenborg provides a vision of the afterlife that goes beyond describing the body of, for example, Christ, expanding this to include visions of angelic and satanic bodies as well. ‘But to come to experience’, Swedenborg writes, ‘That angels are human forms of men, I have seen a thousand times, and have conversed with them, as one man with another, sometimes singly, sometimes with many together’ (Heaven and Hell, §74). These angels and devils are human beings who have died and assumed their eternal forms in the spiritual world, but, as the controversial Conjugal Love makes clear, ‘that world hath been heretofore unknown, and mankind been in total ignorance that the angels of heaven are men, in a perfect form, and in like manner infernal spirits, but in an imperfect form’.9 Moreover, a central part of improving humanity’s knowledge of the divine entails a recognition of the cosmic significance of the sexual act (Schuchard, ‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’, p. 61), and, as Conjugal Love makes explicit, intercourse between husband and wife can rightly be expected to continue into the afterlife: That there are marriages in heaven, cannot be admitted as an article of faith with those [. . .] whose idea of a soul or spirit is as of an attenuated aether or vapour[. . .]. [F]or it would in such case have been objected, how can soul be joined with soul or vapour with vapour, as one conjugal partner with another here on earth? [. . .] [B]ut now, inasmuch as several particulars have been revealed [. . .] it is possible that the assertion respecting marriages, as having place in that world, may be established and confirmed, even so as to convince the reason, by the following positions, I. That man liveth as a man after death. II. That in this case a male is a male, and a female a female. III. That every one’s proper love remaineth with him after death. IV. That expeciall the love of the sex remaineth, and with those who go to heaven, as is the case with all who become spiritual here on earth, Conjugal Love remaineth. V. These things fully confirmed by ocular demonstration. VI. Consequently that there are marriages in the heavens. VII. That spiritual nuptials are to be understood by the Lord’s words where he saith, that after the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage. (Conjugal Love, §27) The relationship of the self with God is, as the preface makes clear, interrelated with the relationship with one’s sexual partner, ‘inasmuch


as the blessedness of that love to eternity will depend altogether upon the degree of purification and regeneration attained to by the sincere love of God’ (p. iv). In Swedenborg too, therefore, the most perfect relationship with the divine other is made visible in a corporeal manner, through the interaction of two distinct bodies whose sexual union does not signal a destruction of individual identities, even if those identities are for a time merged in a union emblematic of the Godhead. This sense of the significance of the sexualised body corresponds with particular modes of radical politics. As Schuchard reports, the promotion of Swedenborg’s more risqué sexual and alchemical theories, by Augustus Nordenskjöld and Charles Bernhard Wadström, ‘exacerbated an emerging liberal–conservative split in the society’ (‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’, p. 65) and prompted the establishment of an independent church at Great Eastcheap, which would remain separate from the revolutionary Masonic Lodges across Europe. William and Catherine Blake attended the Great Eastcheap Conference held in April 1789 and signed the manifesto intended to heal the rift. However, the division remained and was exacerbated when Nordenskjöld attempted to persuade the liberals to join a secret interior order that would promote the more radical sexual and political aspects of Swedenborgian theosophy (ibid., pp. 65–6). In addition to pro-revolutionary activities, Swedenborg’s ideas about conjugal love also intersected with the promotion of abolition via Nordenskjöld’s proposal to set up a Swedenborgian community in Africa, ‘organized on the central premise of prolonged “Virile Potency”’,10 another issue that receives considerable attention in the New Jerusalem Magazine (see in particular Volumes 1 and 2). The publication of Swedenborg’s texts and promotion of his ideas are thus of particular significance in the genealogy of the unfolding of mystery which we have been discussing. On the one hand, this was accomplished through the formation of secret societies associated with freemasonry, though on the other the ultimate objectives of at least some Swedenborgians involved the removal of political and religious obscurity and the universal promotion of republicanism and abolition alongside a set of theosophical teachings that emphasised spiritual experience over received tradition, stressed the human manifestation of the deity, and placed great importance on the visible body as this would be translated into spiritual form.11 Blake’s knowledge and incorporation of Swedenborg’s ideas is widely acknowledged and his annotations to Heaven and Hell as well as Divine Love and Divine Providence are extant. His comments on Heaven and Hell and Divine Love are generally favourable, but his remarks on Divine

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Providence accuse Swedenborg of contradiction, Predestinarianism, and ‘Lies & Priestcraft’.12 Although Blake and Catherine put their names to the Eastcheap manifesto, his disillusionment with the church and increasing antipathy towards Swedenborg himself appears to have occurred shortly thereafter. In addition to the critical nature of his annotations to Divine Providence, Viscomi’s re-dating of The Marriage indicates that by the end of 1790 Blake had completed his overt parody of Swedenborgian doctrine (‘The Evolution of The Marriage’, pp. 284–5; Blake and the Idea, pp. 235–40). As Schuchard notes, however, ‘though [he] scorned the prudish “angels” of the Eastcheap Society, he would have found ready sympathizers for his illuminated prophecies among the illuminist “devils” of the Universal Society’ (‘Secret Masonic History’, p. 46). Nonetheless, though Blake’s work retains aspects of Swedenborgian doctrine and whilst he certainly continued to sympathise with the more radical Swedenborgians, many of his attacks are directed towards the prophet himself. Moreover, Blake was not alone in his attacks on Swedenborg’s vanity and his concern over an overstatement of the prophet’s insight. As Worrall points out, similar issues were pointed out in March 1789, by fellow Swedenborgian W. Brian, whose letter carried sufficient ‘political resonance [. . .] to be discussed by the Privy Council’ the following December (‘Blake and 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture’, pp. 197–8). Not only does this indicate a lively debate about the writings of Swedenborg himself, but it heightens the sense that such debates carried a strong political charge. There are several possible explanations for Blake’s seemingly abrupt change of heart regarding Swedenborg. Thompson argues that the initial affinity between Blake and Swedenborg is itself problematic as ‘it is difficult to understand what a poet with an imagination so concrete could have made of a language which dissolves whatever it touches into abstractions’ (p. 133). He suggests that Blake’s early embrace of Swedenborg stems from their shared indebtedness to Boehme, ‘that Blake was reading into Swedenborg opinions which he already held and which he seemed to glimpse through hazes which arose probably from similar Behmenist fires’ (ibid.). However, not only is it problematic to describe the concrete visions of spiritual experience as ‘abstractions’, but Swedenborg’s impact is certainly more influential than Thompson allows, for key Blakean concepts – such as the Poetic Genius, the ‘phantasy’ and the limitations of natural science – seem to have evolved through Blake’s engagement with Swedenborg. Far more useful is Thompson’s suggestion that Blake’s hostility was due in part to the conflicts within the New Church (p. 167), though it is clear that Blake himself engaged in the


debates surrounding conjugal love. That Blake took such conflict to heart is suggested in his annotations to Divine Love. Swedenborg’s text aligns love and understanding with the Behmenist contraries of light and heat, proposing that ‘if they are both elevated, a Marriage of them is effected’ (§414). Blake endorses this distinction and incorporates it into his response to a doctrinal dispute within the New Church: ‘Is it not false then, that love recieves influx thro the understandg as was asserted in the society’ (§414; E608). The importance that Blake attached to the relationship between love and understanding is attested to by his subsequent comments on section 419, where he draws on Swedenborg to conclude that ‘[love] was not created impure & is not naturally so’ and that ‘it does not recieve influx thro the understanding’ (E608). Blake’s concern over the exact relationship between love and understanding suggests that he finds something of positive significance in Swedenborg’s reworking of Boehme’s ‘heat’ and ‘light’. In particular, his dispute with ‘the society’ results from a disagreement about the role played by understanding, which Blake, following Swedenborg, insists must be viewed as bearing a contrary, though necessary, relation to love.13 Moreover, as Schuchard points out, the conflict over divine influx was itself caught up on conservative anxieties concerning the erotic aspects of this teaching (‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’, p. 65). Swedenborg’s ideas about the influx of love are of continued influence on Blake, even after he leaves the New Church and largely forsakes the prophet. However, it is important to recognise that in the social context of 1790, Blake’s accusation that Swedenborg ‘conversed not with Devils[. . .], for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions’ (The Marriage, 22; E43) carries political as well as philosophical undertones, associating Swedenborg with mental passivity and the rational usurper who ‘governs the unwilling’ (5; E34). Although Sabri-Tabrizi’s inference that Blake would have found Swedenborg’s political and religious background repugnant needs to be tempered with an awareness of the Swede’s ties with Jacobinism and the radical politics of the Ancient Masonic lodges, his suggestion that Swedenborg’s ‘Heaven’ refers to the world of churchmen and nobles seems, on the basis of The Marriage at least, to capture the overall sense of Blake’s objections, though in the caricatures of Swedenborgian angels Blake may well have in mind particular individuals within the conservative faction of the New Church.14 In any case, there is another sense in which Swedenborg’s theosophy runs counter to Blake’s own ideas about the relationship between vision and politics. Whereas Blake’s poetry repeatedly emphasises the connection between spiritual vision and the socio-political context

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in which it occurs, Swedenborg insists that it can only occur when one ‘is withdrawn inwardly’ (Heaven and Hell, §76). Indeed, Urizen, himself ‘A self-contemplating shadow’ (Urizen, 3.21; E71), can be seen to represent the perils of the withdrawal into introspection, as can the ill-fated exodus of Urizen’s children, who ‘left the pendulous earth: / [. . .] called it Egypt, & left it’ (ibid., 28.21–2; E83). Swedenborg draws a sharp distinction between natural light and spiritual light, arguing that it is the latter which provides the living force of creation and at times Blake almost sounds as if he endorses this distinction. When Swedenborg argues that man may comprehend divine omnipresence by elevating his thoughts into a spiritual light, Blake writes ‘Observe the distinction here between Natural & Spiritual as seen by Man’ and he remarks that ‘Man may comprehend. but not the natural or external man’ (Divine Love, §8, 9; E603). However, Blake’s endorsement of this dichotomy is not as unambiguous as it may first appear. If we take ‘Natural & Spiritual’ as the object of the verb ‘seen’ in the first remark, then it appears that Blake is simply directing our attention to the fact that ‘Man’ sees both nature and spirit. However, the main verb, ‘Observe’, directs our attention to ‘distinction’ and if we take this as the object of ‘seen’, then the meaning is rather different, for what ‘Man’ is seeing is the dichotomy rather than its two poles. Bringing Blake’s second comment, which speaks of man’s twofold comprehension, to bear on his first, we can suggest that the ‘distinction’ itself will be perceived differently by the natural and the spiritual. ‘Man may comprehend’, can be read simply as ‘Man may understand’, but it might also carry further ideas of bringing the natural and the spiritual together. The OED lists several relevant usages, including ‘To grasp, take in, or apprehend with the senses’, which might suggest an expanded mode of perception capable of perceiving both the spiritual and the natural; ‘To include in the same category’, which again would emphasise the notion of effacing the dichotomy; and ‘To enclose or have within it; to contain; to lie around’, which points towards the inclusion of both the natural and the spiritual within the human form. Such a reading implies a threat to the stability of the distinction between the spiritual and the natural which is central to Swedenborg’s idea of divine light: ‘Without two Suns the one living and the other dead, there can be no Creation’ (E605).15 Blake’s response to this idea is equivocal: ‘False philosophy according to the letter. but true according to the spirit’ (E605). While Blake seems to support the gist of Swedenborg’s assertion, he clearly rejects a literal understanding of the distinction between the spiritual (living sun) and the natural (dead sun), a move that clearly


anticipates later condemnations of mind–body dualism in The Marriage and Visions. In section 164, however, Swedenborg clearly posits the actual existence of two suns: ‘it follows that the one Sun is living and that the other Sun is dead, also that the dead Sun itself was created by the living Sun from the Lord’ (E605). In the left margin, Blake again queries Swedenborgian dualism, asking ‘how could life create death’ (ibid.). Although Blake is prepared to accept the dead sun as a symbol of fallen or natural perception, he insists that it ‘is only a phantasy of evil Man’ (§166; E605) and he categorically refuses to recognise the existence of anything that does not actively participate in the process of living creation. Thus, when Swedenborg declares that ‘the Heat, Light and Atmospheres of the natural World conduce nothing to this Image of Creation, but only the Heat, Light and Atmospheres of the Sun of the spiritual World’, Blake concludes, ‘Therefore the Natural Earth & Atmosphere is a Phantasy’ (§315; E607). This conclusion marks a significant point of contention between Blake and Swedenborg, for whereas Swedenborg develops a heterogeneous and hierarchical onto-theological system, Blake’s world-view rejects the dualism of his predecessor. There are different modes of vision, but only one true mode of existence, even if this is, as we’ve been suggesting tentative and dynamic, an experience that comes close to Derrida’s descriptions of the perhaps. To give credence to the idea of a natural world distinct from the spiritual is to ascribe a positive ontological status to an illusion. This difference between a homogeneous and heterogeneous perspective has important ramifications for the idea of spiritual vision. For Swedenborg, the prophet removes himself from the world of human beings and aligns himself with the world of angels; for Blake, on the other hand, the prophetic experience occurs on a human level. When Swedenborg refers to the act of ‘keeping the Understanding some Time in Spiritual Light’, Blake insists, ‘this Man can do while in the body’ and in response to Swedenborg’s assertion that men cannot feel spiritual heat and light, Blake writes, ‘He speaks of Men as meer earthly Men not as receptacles of spirit, or else he contradicts N 257’ (§40, 181; E604, 605; italics signify Blake’s underlining). Likewise, where Swedenborg declares that ‘Man, whilst he is in natural Heat and Light, knoweth nothing of spiritual Heat and Light’, Blake maintains that ‘This is certainly not to be understood according to the letter for it is false by all experience’ (ibid.). Blake expends considerable energy attempting to discredit those interpretations that present Swedenborg’s ideas about nature and spirit, body and soul, in a manner unfavourable to his own. In addition to the

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controversy over the relationship between love and understanding, Blake also alludes to interpreters who, he alleges, misunderstand Swedenborg’s dualism: Many perversely understand him. as if man while in the body was only conversant with natural Substances, because themselves are mercenary & worldly & have no idea of any but worldly gain. (§257; E606) However, there is a sense in which Blake appears to be protesting too much, such as when Swedenborg insists that there is nothing infinite in the created world and Blake qualifies his adamant opposition – ‘False Take it so or the contrary it comes to the same for if a thing loves it is infinite’ – with the suggestion that ‘Perhaps we only differ in the meaning of the words Infinite & Eternal’ (§49; E604).16 By 1790, however, when he was annotating Divine Love, Blake had clearly moved from an apologetic stance to one of full-blown oppositional critique: the Swedenborgian angel had become a spectre in need of conjuring and correcting. Whereas the annotations to Divine Love attempt to efface any underlying contradictions in its argument, in Divine Providence Blake seizes on Swedenborg’s inconsistencies as marks of philosophical weakness. Thus, in response to section 329, Blake declares: ‘Read N 185 & There See how Swedenborg contradicts himself & N 69 / See also 277 & 203’ (E611). It is difficult to know with certainty what caused Blake’s change of heart. Perhaps it was related to conflicts in the New Church or perhaps Blake’s reading of Divine Providence caused him to recognise irreconcilable differences between himself and Swedenborg. Whatever happened, happened fast. The rapidity with which Blake revises his assessment of Swedenborg, between the Easter of 1789 and the commencement of his work on The Marriage, in what must have been the earlier part of 1790, suggests that whatever compelled Blake to change his mind happened both forcefully and suddenly. The fact that this disillusionment was contemporaneous with the declaration of the National Assembly, the fall of the Bastille and the ratification of the Rights of Man in France seems unlikely to be a coincidence. On the contrary, as Erdman notes, the events in France were accorded a profound significance by Blake and those around him, sparking ‘a renascence of popular enthusiasm in England such as had not existed even in the days of Wilkes and Liberty’ (Prophet, p. 151). Despite the radical politics of many Swedenborgians, it is entirely possible that Blake’s misgivings about certain aspects of


Swedenborg’s thought, together with the exclusivity and inward turn of his prophetic gaze, were heightened by the Revolution. Somewhat surprisingly, neither Sabri-Tabrizi nor Thompson, both of whom pay considerable attention to the relationship between Blake’s thought and its social context, discuss the impact of the Revolution on his Swedenborgianism. Erdman, on the other hand, does suggest a connection, remarking that by 1790 Blake ‘had been drawn by the French Revolution away from the wisdom of angels’ and linking Blake’s affiliation with ‘devils’ in The Marriage to his sympathies for the revolutionaries (ibid., pp. 142, 151–2). Erdman does not extrapolate on this link, but there are two factors that strengthen this connection. First, in addition to the implicit political stance involved in Blake’s rejection of angels and heaven in favour of devils and hell, the likelihood that The Marriage was initially intended as an anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet reinforces Erdman’s suggestion that it represents Blake’s contribution to the Revolution Controversy (pp. 151–2), as a shorter piece could be produced and distributed faster than a longer work.17 Secondly, Blake’s annotations to Divine Providence themselves call attention to the political connotations of Swedenborg’s theosophy and in particular to his seemingly duplicitous depictions of monarchical government. When Swedenborg speaks of ‘a King who thinks his Kingdom and all the Men in it are for him, and not he for the Kingdom and all the Men of which it consists’, Blake notes that ‘He says at N 201 No King hath such a Government as this for all Kings are Universal in their Government otherwise they are No Kings’ (§220; E610). At issue here is Swedenborg’s use of earthly monarchies to structure his conceptualisation of divine providence. God must, Swedenborg argues, have absolute control over creation: ‘for if a King were to allow his Subjects to govern [. . .], he would no longer be a King [. . .] Such a King cannot be said to hold the Government, much less universal Government’ (§201; E610). Not only does this reveal the Predestinarianism which Blake discovers in Swedenborg’s idea of providence, but it also exposes the connection between Swedenborg’s God and the government of absolute and potentially tyrannous monarchs on earth. In a revolutionary climate still charged with optimistic republicanism, which Blake shared, such views could not but sound reactionary and oppressive. Blake’s ideas about the direction of prophetic vision – with its stress on a human, embodied and outward-looking experience – are, in themselves, distinctly different from those of Swedenborg, who describes a withdrawal from the body and a gaze directed away from

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the world of human experience. This difference itself has profound repercussions for conceiving of the relationship between prophetic vision and its socio-political context. Moreover, if Swedenborg’s vision of the spiritual world, with its class-distinctions and monarchical structure, is considered in the political context of 1789–90, he and Blake begin to look very much like political opponents. In particular, Swedenborg becomes a figure imposing a view of angelic virtue, withdrawal and passive obedience onto the prophet, who for Blake ought to be associated with energy, liberty and sensual improvement. Not only does this represent a betrayal of his more radical political beliefs, but it is in a sense, which Blake may well have recognised, a betrayal of his followers in the Universal Society, with whom Blake himself most likely sympathised. Moreover, as Schuchard and Davies suggest (Schuchard and Davies, II, §73), if Blake’s parents may have known Swedenborg through their Moravian connections, the more prudish and self-righteous spectre of Swedenborg being conjured by the increasingly conservative Hindmarsh may well have borne the marks of a betrayal closer to home. In Blake’s condemnations of Swedenborg, there are traces of the animosity that he displays towards Locke, and these may well have a similar source – the suspicion of hypocrisy. Although Blake begins by arguing that certain members of the New Church are misinterpreting the prophet for their own gain, on reading Divine Providence he may well have become convinced that such misreadings were the results of contradictions within Swedenborg’s works themselves. If this were in fact the case, then Blake’s reclassification of Swedenborg from corporeal friend to spiritual enemy could well be part of an attempt to consolidate his own political identity in the face of one whose writings he appears to have once loved too much. Whilst Swedenborg’s memorable relations do not in themselves read like abstractions, the division of the natural from the spiritual do tend in that direction, as it does in the case of Locke. Moreover, although Swedenborg’s angels do advocate some very Blakean tenets, they display an undeniable sense of self-righteousness of the sort that we find parodied on plates 17–20 of The Marriage. These plates describe a ‘Memorable Fancy’ that presents an ironic account of a prototypical Swedenborgian moment – a conversation with an angel: An Angel came to me and said. O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career. (17; E41)


This opening paragraph tells us a lot. Already, the Angel is displaying the traits of a self-closed identity, for his conversational style consists of a series of exclamatories, and an imperative which attempt to situate Blake’s identity within his own world-view. Moreover, it is clear that the Angel’s perspective, his method of organising reality, is derived from conventional interpretations of religious stories about damnation. Blake’s reported response, though somewhat snide, nevertheless displays an openness to alterity and a willingness to engage in dialogue and mutual contemplation: I said. perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable[.] (Ibid.) Blake is playing the Angel at his own game and he is playing to win. The invitation to ‘shew’ suggests that Blake can be convinced through demonstration by bodily senses, a method of persuasion deployed by Swedenborg and noted by Blake in Divine Love (§41; E604). However, Blake reserves the right to interpret the results of this experimental excursion in his own way; that is, in accordance with desire, for value here is not dependent upon virtue but on which ‘lot [. . .] is most desirable’. The notion that the Angel is on the side of reason, established religion and empirical methodology is suggested by the route he takes to ‘hell’. First, they pass through ‘a stable’, which within The Marriage can be connected with the ‘horses of instruction’ from plate 9 and on an intertextual level with Swift’s equine bastions of reason, the Houyhnhnms – note that the rational messiah falling into hell on plate 5 is represented as a horse. Next, they go ‘thro’ a church’, symbol of institutionalised religion, then a ‘mill’, which can symbolise both economic exploitation and the Newtonian universe, finally and appropriately arriving in ‘a cave’ (17; E41). In this way they arrive at the hell described in Blake’s annotations to Lavater, shut up with corporeal passions inside the head of caverned man (Aphorisms, §309; E590). Winding their way deeper into the cavern, they at last arrive at ‘a void boundless as a nether sky’ (ibid.). Here their journey stops. Blake immediately suggests that they ‘commit [themselves] to this void, and see whether providence is here also’ (17; E41) – that is whether God’s government is in fact universal – but the Angel refuses, commanding Blake to ‘remain’ and ‘behold thy lot which will soon appear when the darkness passes away’ (ibid.). It is only by keeping Blake passive and by deterring his exploration of the void that the Angel allows the Behmenist ‘Abyss’ to appear. The notion

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that this vision depicts a fixed and stable outcome is central to the Angel’s argument that this is to be Blake’s eternal lot; however, as Blake makes clear at the end of this ‘Memorable Fancy’, it is instead one side of a mutual imposition. The ‘Abyss’ has not been created out of nothing, but rather is only a portion of the infinite shaped by the Angel’s selfrighteous perspective – a perspective that looks down on the natural sun from ‘an immense distance’ and beholds it as ‘black but shining’ (18; E41). After the Angel has been suitably horrified by this contemplation of ‘hell’, he climbs back into the mill, signalling his return to a universe of circular reasoning. Once the Angel’s sphere of influence has been removed, Blake is free to enjoy the specimens of genius offered by this particular hell: I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light hearing a harper who sung to the harp. & his theme was, The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water & breeds reptiles of the mind. (19; E42) The domesticity of this scene would seem to reflect the passivity behind the Angel’s self-righteous conjuration of hell-fire and the message conveyed by the harper speaks to the Angel’s own harping, which prevents him from considering alternate modes of organising experience. Once Blake has had enough, or perhaps even too much, of this manifestation of hell, he returns to the Angel and explains that their experience of the Abyss was in fact ‘owing to [his] metaphysics’ (19; E42). Blake attempts to convince the Angel of this assertion by undertaking the same demonstration, this time in reverse. Instead of going down to find hell, they move upwards, towards the space that in the Angel’s world-view constitutes heaven. Their first stopping point is the sun, where Blake dons the appropriate outfit for their visit to heaven, clothing himself ‘in white’, and picks up ‘Swedenborg’s volumes’, an ironically appropriate guide to heavenly climes (ibid.). Next, they light on Saturn, which is significant both within Roman mythology, where Saturn is the deposed monarch of the Titans, and within enlightenment astronomy in which the planet (which lost its status as the furthest perceptible planet with the discovery of Uranus in 1781) represents the transgression of ‘the ratio of all we have already known’ (No Natural Religion [b]; E2). Blake propels the Angel beyond the limits of the known, taking him ‘into the void, between saturn & the fixed stars’, where they again arrive at ‘the stable and the church’ (19; E42). Rather than taking the Angel to the vault, however, Blake leads him to the altar, a site of


longstanding doctrinal debate over the interpretation of the Eucharist and hence a space charged by disputes over Christ’s ontological status – an issue Blake addresses in the next ‘Memorable Fancy’ (22–4; E43) and one which, as we have seen, is a fundamental aspect of his Moravian inheritance. Blake then opens the Bible, only to reveal that it is in fact ‘a deep pit’ (ibid.). On the one hand, the representation of the Bible as a hole can be read as an allusion to eighteenth-century exegetical anxieties over Mosaic authorship and the historical corruption of the sacred text; on the other, it suggests that, read within the context of the established church, the Bible becomes a gateway to Blake’s idea of hell. At the bottom of the pit, Blake and the Angel seem to find themselves back in everyday England, gazing upon ‘seven houses of brick’ (ibid.). Upon entering these, they discover that the inhabitants are not human beings, but lustful and carnivorous primates. The monkeys may be viewed as men confined by the twin-chains of religion and natural philosophy, which prevents them from moving beyond the circumference of their own existence to fully embrace the other. Moreover, this phantasy reduces their desire to the self-centred drive to satisfy animal lusts and appetites: & all of that species [were] chained by the middle, grinning and snatching at each other, but witheld by the shortness of their chains: however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devourd [. . .] and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail[.] (20; E42) The significance of these beasts within this particular scenario becomes apparent when the narrative moves into the Mill. Presumably for demonstrative purposes, Blake has brought along the skeleton of one of the victims from the house, but within the Mill the body becomes ‘Aristotles Analytics’ (20; E42). Given that the apparent circularity of Aristotelian logic was widely perceived as a motivating factor in the development of the empirical method, this transformation from corpse to system is appropriate in the context of the mill, which as we have seen emblematises the circularity of both the philosophy of the schoolmen and the empirical method that sought to replace it. Life inside the houses is undeniably horrific, with inhabitants living out Hobbes’ conceptualisation of man in a state of nature, but in the mill the violence suffered by the body is magnified as the victim is reduced to a mental abstraction, to the phantasy of evil man. There is little room here for

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a post-mortem improvement in sensual experience, let alone for any sense of a loving relation between the deceased and the Christ. This vision of the Angel’s eternal lot bears an ironic resemblance to Swedenborg’s idea of hell, both in its location and in its olfactory attributes. In Heaven and Hell (§584), Swedenborg emphasises that each Hell is accessed through its own ‘hole’, similar to the location of the Angel’s eternal lot at the bottom of a deep pit. Moreover, Blake’s remark upon the ‘stench [that] terribly annoyed us’ (The Marriage, 20; E42) is reminiscent of Swedenborg’s description of the noxious vapours that provide the atmosphere for each Hell (§585). Thus, at the end of this ‘Fancy’ it is the Angel, rather than Blake, whose eternal lot is dreadful and horrific, comprising an uncanny hybrid of a Swedenborgian hell and a Hobbesian state of nature. The Angel, of course, does not perceive the connection between his own metaphysics and this vision of torment. He complains that ‘thy phantasy has imposed upon me’, which as Blake points out overlooks the phantasmic status of his own demonstration: ‘I answerd: we impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics’ (20; E42). Of course, on an extra-textual level the Angel is right in a way that cannot be understood from within the narrative, for Blake’s own encoding of the episode has been done for a purpose. The narrative itself functions as a parable and thus the Angel has, from the start, been set up as an example that illustrates the criticism of Swedenborg which Blake makes on the following plate: I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning. (21; E42) However, by embodying this story in the narrative form of a ‘Fancy’, the imposition of Blake as author is still of a different order than the imposition of the Angel, which constructs itself as an eternal truth validated through sensory demonstration. As it is embodied in a narrative rather than a rationally demonstrative form, the Fancy openly presents itself as a text that demands interpretation rather than as a set of evidences or proofs that is to be taken as truth. As such, it does not make the totalising claims made by the Urizenic philosopher-priest who, we may recall, hides his ‘phantasies’ within ‘Sulphureous fluid’ (Urizen, 10.14; E75). Blake’s text reveals the phantasies implied by the distinction between nature and spirit and provides instead an example of a marriage, albeit


a stormy one, of contraries in which ‘Opposition is true Friendship’ (The Marriage, 20; E42). Given Blake’s evident partisanship throughout The Marriage, we might well question his commitment to this ideal of amicable contrariety. However, the abrupt transition from his dismissal of his dialogue with the Angel as ‘lost time’ to the declaration of ‘Opposition’ as ‘true Friendship’ may reflect his own sense of a certain ambivalence regarding his theosophic opponent. Even in his overt attack on Swedenborg’s writings as ‘a recapitulation of all superficial opinions’, Blake grants Swedenborg ‘an analysis of the more sublime’ (22; E43). This back-handed complement may stem from Blake’s own sense that certain elements of Swedenborg’s thought were not entirely erroneous, but this proximity to truth in all likelihood would have served to further enflame Blake’s animosity. In particular, Blake appears to have found Swedenborg’s discussion of natural and spiritual ideas amenable to his ideas about the Poetic Genius, which he first announced (in All Religions) in the same year as the publication of the English translation of Divine Love (1788). Swedenborg describes the ‘natural idea’ as a conception that is contaminated by notions of space, of ‘Length, Breadth and Heighth’ (Divine Love, §7). The spiritual idea, on the other hand, ‘doth not derive any Thing from Space, but it derives every Thing appertaining to it from State’ which is ‘predicated of Love, of Life, of Wisdom, of the Affection, [and] of the Joys thence derived’ (ibid.). Thus: In the spiritual World [. . .] [while] there appear Spaces like the Spaces upon Earth [. . .] they are not Spaces but Appearances; for they are not fixed and stationary as in the Earth; they can be lengthened and contracted, changed and varied; and therefore, because they cannot be determined by Measure, they cannot in that World be comprehended by any natural Idea. (Ibid.) In his notes on this passage, Blake renames the spiritual idea, the ‘Poetic idea’ (E603), which suggests the possibility that the divine can in fact manifest itself materially through artistic production. Hence, while the natural idea produces a phantasy that cannot accommodate anything other than fixed measurements, the fancies produced by poetic ideas embody divine qualities of love and affection and in so doing bring the artist into a redemptive relationship with God. This point is brought home in Blake’s annotation to section 10. Swedenborg writes: the Lord, although he is in the Heavens with the Angels every where, nevertheless appears high above them as a Sun: and whereas the

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Reception of Love and Wisdom constitutes Affinity with him, therefore those Heavens appear nearer to him where the Angels are in a nearer Affinity from Reception, than where they are in a more remote Affinity [. . .]. Similar is the Case with Man, in whom and with whom the Lord is present. Swedenborg here emphasises the role of love in the appearance of proximity or distance, which is itself dependent upon the affinity of self and other. The more love one receives, the closer one appears in relation to God. Blake’s response to these lines, ‘He who Loves feels love descend into him & if he has wisdom may perceive it is from the Poetic Genius which is the Lord’ (E603), pertains to the reception of love itself. As Schuchard notes, the reference to wisdom likely points towards the erotic trance described by Swedenborg (‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’, p. 65), suggesting a conjunction – one that resurfaces in The Marriage – linking artistic production, divine love and sexual union. More than this, Blake’s annotation echoes the representations of love and loving that we encounter in the letters of Blake’s mother and her first husband, in which, as we have seen, love is depicted as an act of the self that is nonetheless dependent upon the arrival of love from Christ, the other who is both within and without. This representation itself is echoed earlier in Divine Love, where Swedenborg notes that ‘spiritual Heat’ (which is ‘love’) and ‘spiritual Light’ (wisdom) ‘descend also by Influx into Men and affect them, altogether in Proportion as they become Recipients according to their Love of the Lord, and their Love towards their Neighbour’ (§5). The capacity to love is a gift that with no hint of paradox is bestowed upon the one who loves, though for Swedenborg, unlike for Thomas Armitage, the amount of love that is given is equal in measure to that which is bestowed. Blake’s annotation, in what, without claiming definite religious affinity, we might describe as good Moravian fashion, does away with Swedenborg’s economic reckoning. ‘He who Loves feels love descend into him.’ There is no implicature suggesting that love will be withheld (if, for example, one does not love one’s neighbour sufficiently), but the experience of love depends upon the act of loving. The apparent paradox is thus retained, for in order to experience love – and not as an object, but as the active subject – one must first love. Or, as Blake proclaims elsewhere, ‘Each thing is its own cause & its own effect’ (Aphorisms, §226; E601). ‘It may be then’, Derrida writes, ‘[. . .] that only the coming of the event allows, after the event, perhaps, what it will previously have made possible to be thought [i.e. the conditions of possibility that in retrospect


allow the event to occur]’ (Politics, p. 18). The apparent proximity with Blake, here, is not coincidental. Derrida is close to Blake both in the example he uses – the occurrence of primary friendship, which itself entails active love – and in relating the arrival of the event to the question of revelation: a thought (ontological or meta-ontological) of conditions of possibility and structures of revealability, or of the opening on to truth, may well appear legitimately and methodologically anterior to gaining access to all singular events of revelation [. . .]. ‘In fact’, ‘in truth’, it would be only the event of revelation that would open – like a breaking-in, making it possible after the event – the field of the possible in which it appeared to spring forth, and for that matter actually did so. (Ibid.) Blake is coming at things from a similar perspective where, via Swedenborg’s description of affection, he seems to have arrived at a definition of the Poetic Genius which links the human being with God, the self with the other, through a relationship constituted by active desire. Drawing on eighteenth-century anxieties about the degeneration of language, Swedenborg not only seeks to purge the word ‘Love’ of all abstraction, but he does this by fusing the psychological concept of the mental ‘affection’ with the commonplace experience of loving ‘affection’. He writes: Though the Word Love is so universally in the Mouths of Men, scarcely any one knoweth what Love is; whilst he meditates upon it, inasmuch as he cannot then form to himself any Idea of Thought concerning it, he says either that it is not any real Thing, or that it is only something flowing in through the Sight, Hearing, Feeling and Conversation, and thereby affecting him; he is altogether ignorant that it is his very Life, not only the common Life of his whole Body, and the common Life of all his Thoughts, but also the Life of all the Particulars thereof: A wise Man may perceive this from the following Queries; If you remove the Affection, which is of Love, can you think any Thing? And can you do any Thing? Doth it not happen that in Proportion as the Affection which is of Love groweth cold, the Thought, Speech and Action grow cold also? And that in Proportion as it is heated, they also are heated: But this a wise Man perceiveth, not from a Knowledge that Love is the Life of Man, but from Experience of this Fact. (Divine Love, §1)

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The OED notes a longstanding usage of ‘affect’ as ‘feeling, desire, or appetite, as opposed to reason; passion, lust, evil-desire’ and another as ‘the way in which a thing is physically affected or disposed; especially, the actual state of the body’. The second usage is particularly evident in Priestley and Hartley, where ‘affection’ is used as a general term for ‘mental operations’ such as ‘memory, imagination, volition, [and] reasoning’, which, they argue, affect the physical state of the brain.18 Swedenborg’s usage conjoins the affective component of thought and its manifestations in speech and action to a concept of love as a divine emanation. Without love there could be no affect, no thought or experience of any sort whatsoever; but the knowledge of this fact, the just conception of love in the mind, can only be perceived through ‘Experience of this Fact’, which, as we have seen, Swedenborg insists is itself dependent upon the act of loving. Blake, contrary to Swedenborg, remarks that this can also be perceived ‘from Knowledge but not with the natural part’ (§1; E602), suggesting perhaps an innate awareness open to the Poetic Genius. However, Blake anticipates Derrida by suggesting that the thought, the image, must precede the experience: Think of a white cloud. as being holy you cannot love it but think of a holy man within the cloud love springs up in your thought. for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. thought alone can make monsters. but the affections cannot[.] (Divine Love, §11; E603)19 The sort of ‘mental affect’ described by empirical physiologists makes a monster out of human beings by divorcing love from affection. Thus, affection is no longer that which induces men and women to move beyond themselves but rather it becomes self-closed, referring only to the manner in which the body affects itself through an enclosed system of nervous fibres. Ironically, Priestley’s attempts to make the soul materialise by inserting it into the domain of empirical science (i.e. the perceivable body), reduce the affect to the status of a mere effect, to a fixed arrangement of spatial relations whose capacity for redemption is tied to the irrational promise of an inaccessible other. As Blake writes beside section 14 of Divine Love, ‘Thought without affection makes a distinction between Love & Wisdom as it does between body & Spirit’ (E603). Thus, the jurisprudent God is rendered distinct from the God of compassion, and redemption becomes a matter of passive obedience rather than active engagement. Desire becomes construed as a sin, not in its fulfilment, but in its failure to fulfil.


The image at the bottom of plate 4 of The Marriage nicely illustrates this sense of messianic impotence. The figure on the right is surrounded by the flames of bodily desire, his body echoes the movement of the flames outwards, and he is reaching towards the woman with the child on the left, who is likewise moving towards him. But, as Erdman notes, ‘they are kept apart by her clutching of the infant and by a chain on the man’s right ankle’.20 Although the chain is not present in all copies, the fact that the figures do not touch suggests that the barrier between them has not been entirely surpassed. But it is not the fire which is impeding them. While one of the man’s legs is being carried upwards by the flame, the other remains embroiled in the dark waters beneath the fire. The woman, meanwhile, is being impeded because her forward movement is obstructing, and is obstructed by, the child’s movement towards the sun behind them. If the woman would release the child to follow his or her volition and if the man could free himself from the darkness that opposes the flames, the two would, it seems, meet. This potential union represents the movement out from one’s own circumference and into someone else’s. Such interpenetration is intimated in the depiction of the figures embracing at the bottom of the title page. Both are naked and appear to be kissing, suggesting sexual intimacy. The figure on the left, like the man on the bottom of plate 4, is being lifted outwards with the flames, but he does not appear to be bound down and both of his feet are firmly positioned in the centre of the fire. The figure on the right is resting upon a cloud or a billow of smoke and, though reclining, is also unbound. Although neither the smoke nor the fire is arranged in a perfect circle, the fire seems to be at its most intense in the bottom left corner of the plate and the smoke seems densest near the bottom right. This gives the impression that both the fire and the smoke are radiating out from their respective centres and intermingling in the middle of the plate with the flames wrapping themselves around the smoke. The distinction between the cloud or smoke and the fire, as well as the difference in their postures, suggests that each figure exists within its own particular encasing. However, both figures are reaching out from their respective centres in order to embrace at the point where the fire and the smoke meet. On one level, this image appears to represent the potential of interpersonal connection. Not only the interpenetration of fire and smoke/cloud, but also the act of embrace, the suggestion of a kiss and the apparent eye contact suggest that the two figures have managed to reach beyond themselves, whilst still retaining their own individual identities, as represented by their respective ‘atmospheres’. Moreover, the five couples ascending in the space above them suggest

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an even more complete and active union. On a more (sublimely) allegorical level, moreover, this image hints at a marriage of contraries, with the figure on the left representing an active devil and the figure on the right a more passive – though, as the reciprocity of the embrace suggests, not entirely docile or virtuous – angel (see Erdman, Illuminated, p. 98). Mutual imposition has been replaced by affectionate interaction and desire has moved from phantasy into enactment. The rejection of a certain spectre of Swedenborg contains within itself, as it does in Blake’s mental war with Locke, elements stolen, perhaps unconsciously, from the opposition. In his discussion of Marx, Derrida will make much of the twofold sense of ‘conjuration’ as an act that, on the one hand, evokes or brings forth the ghost, spirit or spectre, but on the other seeks to ‘expulse the evil spirit’ (Specters, pp. 40–1, 44). Nowhere is this twofold effect more evident than in The Marriage, on two plates that we have examined before. On plate 23, prior to his devilish conversion, the angel, outraged by the devil’s image of worshipping God as he is incarnated in human beings, changes colour in a manner that can clearly be connected with Priestley (Gleckner, p. 38), but the idea that such self-righteous indignation might instigate such alterations could well come from Swedenborg’s description of ‘Satans’, whose appearances are tied directly to their successive states of mind: This Satan [. . .] appeared, at first, with a white living face, afterwards with a dead pale face, and, lastly, with a black infernal face. [. . .] [S]uch are the successive states of their minds, who are merely natural. For [. . .] the inmost principles of their minds, inasmuch as they are infernal, are represented in their faces by the blackness; the middle principles, inasmuch as they have falsified truths, by the dead paleness, but the outermost principles, by the living whiteness; because, when they are in externals, which takes place when they are in public assembly, they can think, confirm, understand, and teach truths. (NJM, I, pp. 43–4) Blake’s chameleon angel similarly becomes ‘white pink & smiling’ when his mind settles on externals, on public modes of worship and obedience such as the ten commandments (23; E43). This connection, moreover, highlights the link between the ‘natural’ reason and the paucity of spiritual knowledge provided by orthodox religion – a connection posited by both Blake and Swedenborg. In a similar vein, the reading proposed above for plate 14, which suggests that the Blakean apocalypse involves the annihilation of certain onto-theological


presumptions rather than a destruction of the material universe as such, seems to owe something to Swedenborg’s own description of the ‘the consummation of the age’ as the destruction not of the material world, but as a transformation in the way that humanity thinks about the spiritual world (NJM, I, pp. 76–8). What such incorporation suggests, particularly when it occurs – as it does here – in combination with the conjurement of figures such as Priestley and Locke, is not only an example of the multifarious nature of inheritance, but also the appearance again of the friendly enemy. In the annotations to Heaven and Hell and Divine Love, Swedenborg appears as a friend, while in the hostile remarks found in Divine Providence and The Marriage he becomes an enemy. In both roles, however, he remains a key figure in the evolution of Blake’s thoughts on the relation between the natural and the spiritual, on the development of a vision of experience open to alterity. Even when opposition to the prophet reaches its apex, his ghost walks the corridors of Blake’s work, haunting it alongside all the others. Visor lifted, we see him now besmirched, now ‘white pink & smiling’.

Divine vision as political force From a seer who converses with the dead in the next world, we come to a prophet who beholds angels and devils walking the streets of this one. In the conjunction of spiritual vision and radical politics that cannot be entirely expunged from Swedenborg’s angelic relations, we find a precursor to the waves of enthusiasm that, as Mee suggests, work to threaten the status quo of London in the 1790s (Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 47). In addition to Priestley, Mee notes that Blake’s prophetic rhetoric belies a marked similarity to the writings of Richard Brothers, who shared Blake’s belief in the egalitarian and continual possibility of divine inspiration and who, like Blake, ‘offered to supplement and even replace the received prophetic canon with [his] own visionary experience’ (p. 20). Brothers himself attributes political significance to his divine vision and prophetic mission: I wrote to the King, Queen, and Minister of state, to inform them [. . .] that the time was nearly accomplished for some of the Judgments of God to be made manifest [. . .]: I beseeched them in the most earnest and respectful language, not to join in the War on any account whatever, or even encourage it; for the death of Louis the sixteenth would be impossible to prevent [. . .]; the Revolution in France, and its consequences, proceeded entirely from the Judgment

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of God [. . .]: therefore all attempts to [. . .] preserve the Monarchy by force, was opposing what was determined in the Scripture of Truth. (II, p. 7) It is little surprise that Brothers came to the attention of the Privy Council and had his prophecies derided by opponents of the Revolution. In addition to the pro-revolutionary aspect of Brothers’ prophecy, the outward direction of his prophetic gaze provides a useful contrast with the inward vision endorsed by Swedenborg. Whereas Swedenborg rejects the natural in favour of the spiritual, Brothers imbues natural events with spiritual significance. Thus, ‘the THUNDER that was heard in the evening of the third of August 1793’ becomes ‘the voice of the Angel mentioned in the Nineteenth chapter of the Revelation’; similarly, ‘The SECOND THUNDER [. . .] on Wednesday evening the seventh of August, 1793 [. . .] was the voice of the Angel ascending from the East, having the Seal of the living God’ (A Revealed Knowledge, I, p. 50). For Brothers, as for Blake, hearing the divine voice in the natural world does not depend upon rational investigation, but rather upon the immediate inspiration of God, which permits the prophet to interpret the natural as divine. Moreover, like the prophecies of Ranters such as Coppe and Salmon, Brothers’ spiritual visions incorporate earthly situations and locales. During one particular vision, for example, Brothers perceives ‘Satan walking leisurely in London’, while in another he watches ‘a large River run through London coloured with human blood’ (ibid., p. 45). The location of spiritual events within actual geographical locations not only speaks to their political relevance, but also effaces the distinction between the human and the divine, positing an intersection of divine time (i.e. the history and prophecies of the Bible) and human time. Brothers’ writing, like that of his seventeenth-century predecessors, demonstrates an impulse for demystification, for unfolding a mystery that is rendered no less tremendous as it bespeaks the onset of apocalypse. In his explication of the prophecies of Daniel, Brothers interprets the dream Daniel had during the beginning of Belshazzar’s reign as a vision of the downfall of George III: The Lion means George the third, the present King of England: Plucking the wings of the Lion, means taking away the Power of the King: Made stand on his feet as a man, with a man’s heart; means his reduction to the condition of other men, and possessing similar thoughts.


Brothers was by no means alone in his millenarianism. Priestley likewise remarks that ‘it appears to me highly probable, as I hinted in my last discourse on this occasion, that the present disturbances in Europe are the beginning of those very calamitous times [which will precede the arrival of the kingdom of Christ]’.21 However, although Priestley anticipates the removal of mystery and ‘the hand of God in the great scene that is now opening upon us’ (p. 31), he differs from Brothers in not linking his interpretation of prophecies to a personal prophetic experience. Providence may well be directing Priestley’s enquiries behind the scenes, but he does not lay claims to the sort of visionary experience we find in Brothers. Similarly, Brothers echoes Priestley, and other exegetes such as Geddes, in his view that the Bible’s materiality and historicity rendered it subject to corruption: LENGTH of time, change of Countries and Governments, corruption of Language, and hasty copies in writing, [.. .] produces a disagreement in some few parts, and makes it differ from what it originally was in the time of David[,] [. . .]: some parts of the English translation are consequently erroneous: but they are so immaterial as not to affect in the least the truth of its sacred Records, or the tendency of its Divine instruction. (A Revealed Knowledge, II, p. 3) However, unlike his less prophetically inclined counterparts, Brothers attempts to turn these to his advantage, for the possibility of scriptural error provides the potential for correction, allowing him to present his own alterations to the biblical text as ‘by the direction and command of the Lord God’ (A Revealed Knowledge, I, p. 41). Moreover, in a move that we have encountered above, Brothers insists that his conjunction with God enables him to provide an authoritative and supersessive exegesis: I proceed through the Scripture, regularly uncovering, by revealed Knowledge as I go, its sacred Records WHICH HAVE BEEN PRESERVED FOR ME, holding each one up for public View [. . .]; that all Men may behold and examine them, that all men may perceive their Truth, and admire [. . .], not only what was wrote by Daniel at Babylon, EXPLAINED IN LONDON, but likewise a similar Communication of REVEALED KNOWLEDGE. (A Revealed Knowledge, I, p. 2) Again we find perception, clarity and public examination presented as the means of confirming revealed truth and divine communication. Brothers, like Muggleton a century earlier, calls on the experience of his

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audience and their openness to demonstration in order to confirm his prophetic declarations, Biblical readings and political views. Such similarities did not go unmarked at the time. Noting Burke’s portrayal of ‘English partisans of the French Revolution as crazed enthusiasts out of the same mould as the regicides of the 1640s and 50s’, Mee suggests that this had a significant impact on ideas concerning prophecy and unorthodox religious views, for ‘it became increasingly common for loyalists to identify religious heterodoxy with political radicalism’.22 Not only does this suggest a certain continuity between the antinomian tendencies of the mid-seventeenth century and the late eighteenth century, but it also suggests that prophets such as Brothers were consciously participating in a longstanding association between radical politics and spiritual vision. The idea that this connection was made consciously is suggested by Mee himself, who cites as an example Huntington’s preface to the 1792 reprint of Free Grace by John Saltmarsh (ibid., p. 47). Given the political undertones of The Marriage and the combination of prophetic rhetoric and political radicalism in America and Europe, we can surmise that Blake would have been both aware of the connection between prophecy and politics and willing to incorporate this into his own works. While this important aspect of Blake’s thought has been profitably explored by scholars such as Thompson, Worrall and Mee, the concerns of this chapter and of the preceding one have been slightly different. Along with the political affinities shared, though not without difference, by many of the writers discussed above, we find a common emphasis on the primacy of experience, on the importance of expanding or altering perception and on the conjunction between the divine and the human. On an individual level, this manifests itself through descriptions of the connection between human beings and the deity, such as the Muggletonian ideas of the eye of Faith and the prophetic call, Boehme’s representations of the body, Moravian blood theology and Swedenborg’s notion of divine influx. Within the genealogy of divine mystery, of the mysterium tremendum, of the spilling of divine blood so central to Muggletonians and Moravians alike, no less than in the overt political resonance of Brothers’ visions, we can trace the visibilizing of the invisible other, the becoming public of the sacred secret. The influence of such antecedents are clearly evident in Blake’s own visionary materialism, in the rejection of the distinction between body and soul, in the conceptualisation of bodily desire as opening a link with divine energy, and in a vision of infinite perception that returns the gaze of the other, beholding the marks of divinity, of futurity, in the present world of


experience. The abyssal eye’s longing for manifestation and the sexually charged influx of love converge in the Poetic Genius, whose lineage involves the movement from a purely spiritual idea to the poetic idea, which itself tends towards embodiment in acts and works. Implicit in the discussion thus far is a fresh imagining of epistemology and onto-theology, ‘a seismic revolution in the political concept of friendship’ as Derrida might say (Politics, p. 27), one which drastically alters the nature of alterity itself and motions towards a vision of humanity beckoning from just beyond the horizon of all we have already known.

5 The Ark of God

man is the ark of God the mercy seat is above upon the ark cherubims guard it on either side & in the midst is the holy law. man is either the ark of God or a phantom of the earth & of the water if thou seekest by human policy to guide this ark. remember Uzzah II Sam l. – William Blake, Annotations to Aphorisms, §533; E596 And when they came to Nachon’s threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God. – II Samuel 6.6–7 An ark or a phantom, a housing for divinity or a ghost of the earth, such are the alternative visions that Blake presents for humanity. An alternative and also a warning, ‘remember Uzzah’, which may well be directed at Lavater’s own moral inquiries whose human policy risks transforming man into a phantom: I have often, too often, been tempted, at the daily relation of new knaveries, to despise human nature in every individual, till, on minute anatomy of each trick, I found that the knave was only an enthusiast or momentary fool. This discovery of momentary folly [. . .] has thrown a great consolatory light on my inquiries into man’s moral nature: by this the theorist is enabled to assign to each class and each individual its own peculiar fit of vice or folly; and, by the same, he has it in his power to contrast the ludicrous or dismal catalogue 131


with the more pleasing one of sentiment and virtue, more properly their own. (Aphorisms, §533) Aphorism 533, Blake remarks, ‘seems to me to want discrimination’. The appearance of that word ‘want’, which we have seen before in his mother’s petition to the Congregation of the Lamb, again forms a crux of lack or need and desire, of the receptacle waiting to be filled. Lavater himself certainly seems to want discrimination in the second sense, to desire division and classification. Elsewhere Blake will praise Lavater for his powers of discernment, but here his severity of judgement has been misapplied and found lacking. The enthusiast, of whom Blake speaks sympathetically in Aphorism 605, is not the same as the knave for ‘knaveries are not human nature knaveries are knaveries’ (ibid.). Uzzah’s sacrilege, Blake would seem to imply, finds an analogue in those who would seek to take hold of human nature, to hold it fast through the anatomisation of a moral code. But with what kind of death specifically would such presumption be punished? The human policy outlined by Lavater is in fact not far removed from that mill in The Marriage that transforms the corpse, which we have identified with the human being in a state of nature, into ‘Aristotles Analytics’. Uzzah too died on a threshing floor and he did not rise again. Lavater’s ‘consolatory light’ is, Blake would therefore seem to be suggesting, not to be mistaken with that interiorised light that appears in the form of divine love and which occurs, for example, in the letters of Thomas and Catherine Armitage. There are two deaths implied in the alternative visions of humanity that Blake presents, no less than two bodies. The phantom body of earth and water lacks the divine presence of the body as ark, whose death rests upon the mercy seat, site of propitiatory sacrifice, which in Christian iconography involves the putting to death of Christ and the resurgence of divine love. The second body, then, is that whose mortality participates in an incommensurate sacrificial exchange and an eschatological promise of rebirth. This body opens itself to Eternity without for that reason allowing itself to be abstracted from the flesh that gives it form. It is the phantom that is disembodied, not the ark, whose ornamentation itself defies the distinction between sarx and soma. Schuchard remarks upon Blake’s knowledge, which he may have acquired from Moravian sources, of the Kabbalistic tradition that the male and female cherubim guarding the ark ‘were entwined in the act of marital intercourse, thus forming an emblem of God’s joyful marriage with his female emanation, the Shekhinah (or Jerusalem)’ (‘Why Mrs. Blake

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Cried’, p. 48). In the context of a Moravian inheritance, Blake’s mention of both the cherubim and the mercy seat in response to Lavater’s consolatory moralising is certainly provocative, pointing towards a Holy Law housed in spiritually infused flesh, towards the divine sanction granted to the love expressed through the sensual body, rather than to the moral prohibitions imposed by an unseen deity who guards his secrecy with jealousy and wrath. In the history of secrecy that we have been discussing, the impersonal deity that seeks to repress the orgiastic impulse is the god of Plato and, perhaps not coincidentally, it is the pagans who are said to have ‘paraded’ the cherubim ‘through the streets in order to ridicule the Jews’ (ibid.). The theologian who, in aphorisms applauded by Blake, maintains that ‘the purest religion is Epicurism’ and that ‘He, who adores an impersonal God, has none’ here seems to dabble in a rational and moralistic paganism that causes him to misperceive human nature (§366, 552; E591, 596). And this too pertains to the fallout of Uzzah. When David returns to remove the ark to Jerusalem, II Samuel tells us, he ‘danced before the LORD with all his might’, an act of moral abandon for which he is despised and reproached by his jealous wife Michal. There is a contest of wills here, no less than of ethical codes, between David’s desire to uncover himself and dance in public before the Lord and Michal’s sense of regal, marital and moral propriety. The conflict unresolved, ‘Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death’ (II Samuel 6.23). David’s carnal appetites and morally questionable conduct are widely remarked upon and, not coincidentally, they correspond with a certain outburst of orgiastic faith. In that liminal moment of Judeo-Christian history, when the familial god of the patriarchs is on the verge of becoming the institutional god of city and state, but before the ark is removed to the as-yet-unbuilt Temple, the King’s public display of both his body and his enthusiasm for the Lord defies both personal modesty and political mystery. David is not the people’s choice of king, an honour that goes to his predecessor Saul, and his complex character contains both the magnanimous and the megalomaniacal. But, he is Yahweh’s choice of ruler – in Blake’s words, he is the ‘great poet’ who fervently desires and pathetically invokes the Poetic Genius (The Marriage, 12; E39) – and in his ambiguous figure we find interwoven questions of human nature, sexuality, bodily existence and, without perhaps taking things too far, the interiorisation of divine light. Blake’s development of an alternative conception of what it means to be human, in opposition to the phantoms that haunt his enlightenment inheritance, similarly involves him in a number of ambiguities surrounding questions not


only about the relationship between law and desire, but also about the limitations of sexuality, the dangers of perception, and the extent to which the self can or should open itself to the interpenetration of the other.

‘What is Man!’ For Children: The Gates of Paradise addresses the topic of ‘What is Man!’ (E260) through a series of illustrations and captions that present its audience with various and diverse depictions of the human condition. While the title indicates the subject under consideration, the gates of paradise, the vantage from which these gates are being viewed is left unstated and it is therefore unclear whether the work is presenting us with an eternal or a natural perspective. On the one hand, as it depicts man in a variety of states, from the earthen and enclosed to the fiery and free, it presents a universal perspective, associating it with the eternal. On the other hand, the final two plates deal with moribund themes and settings, with ‘Death’s Door’ and a communion with worms, which seems to imply a pessimism that is distinctly mortal. Thus, the work presents itself as liminal, as existing on the threshold where, as the caption of plate 15 declares, ‘Fear & Hope are—Vision’ (E266) and where, as the accompanying illustration depicts, mourners beside a corpse may behold a vision of the soul rising.1 As Parisi notes, the caption on the frontispiece, ‘What is Man!’, can be derived from two distinct biblical sources, Job and Psalms 8, which convey two opposed representations of human existence: ‘a pessimistic evaluation of man’s earthly achievements’ and a celebration of ‘man’s dominant place in creation’.2 Thus, from the outset, the text posits an ambiguous relation between the human, the earthly and the divine. The image on this plate is similarly rich in meaning. It depicts an infant, wrapped in a cocoon atop a leaf, above which a large caterpillar lies, possibly watching the child or eating a second leaf. Parisi connects this scene with the traditional use of caterpillar and butterfly as ‘an allegory of life after death’ and he suggests that it introduces ‘the motif of an imprisoning shell [. . .] [which] stands over The Gates of Paradise from beginning to end’ (‘Emblems’, p. 74). Moreover, the image of the caterpillar would seem to imply the imposition of moral codes in the encapsulation of the human infant via its association with Blake’s earlier proverb: ‘As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys’ (The Marriage, 9; E37). This link between the caterpillar and the priest suggests that the infant will be

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born under priestly dominion, an idea which emerges concretely on plate 14, where the unfavourable connection between the human state and the priestly decree is expressed through the image of Dante’s Ugolino (Erdman, Illuminated, p. 274) and its caption: ‘Does thy God O Priest take such vengeance as this?’ (E265). Plate 3, like plate 1, depicts birth, but this time the image specifically emphasises the organic or vegetative aspect of human experience with children being plucked from the earth as if they were root vegetables. The caption, ‘I found him beneath a Tree’ (E260), suggests that this vegetative image can be combined with an Edenic motif, with the tree representing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Parisi, ‘Emblems’, p. 77). The idea of the vegetative or organic body – at least in its passive, mandrake form – seems, therefore, to be associated from the outset with the dichotomisation of good and evil and the subsequent imposition of moral codes. Plates 4–7 clearly associate man with nature, and in particular with the four elements: water, earth, air and fire. As Erdman suggests, ‘in naming these four pictures by the four elements, Blake stressed their earthbound perspective; the human coming through the fire [plate 7] would be opening a book’ (Illuminated, p. 271). Erdman reads these plates, and the work as a whole, as the depiction of a journey through corporeal existence towards the images of death and the grave in the final two plates. Thus, plate 8 can be read as a turning point on the earthling’s journey, for ‘the metamorphosis promised in the sunlit leaf of the Frontispiece is ripe: wings on the infant human, the cocoon shell breaking’ (ibid.). However, if there is a connection between the cocoon on plate 1 and the caterpillar-eggs/priestly curses from The Marriage then this hatching will not have occurred under auspicious omens. Indeed, although there is more activity in the plates following the hatching, paradise remains at a distance. Nowhere is this more evident than on plates 13 and 14, where the cherub is in danger of having his wings cut and where, as we have seen, the father sits imprisoned with his children. While Erdman suggests that the aged figure on plate 13 ‘cannot perceive [. . .] how little human flight depends on outward plumage’ (p. 274), no hope of redemption appears to be offered to the prisoners of priestly vengeance. For Children depicts human experience as a journey through a world seemingly poised between the organic and the divine, where prophecy is continually under threat from forces that conflate nature and religion, transform caterpillars into priests and leave those born into a vegetative state subject to mutilation and imprisonment. Throughout the work, the representation of human existence is characterised by a dialectic


between fear and hope. While this may progress towards redemption, the vision of this appears to be characterised only by lack. Although on plate 15 we see a soul rising from the body, not only is it framed in a mortal context, addressing figures gathered around a deathbed, but the soul itself appears joined to the foot of its corpse. Erdman argues that on the final plate, ‘the traveller whom we seek is risen’ (p. 277), suggesting that redemption can only be represented by an absence or lack. However, as Parisi suggests, the figure of the traveller throughout the book is ambiguous as well as unsettling and we cannot be sure whether his journey has led to redemption or simply to death (pp. 97–100). Such ambiguity is indeed implied by Erdman’s association of this figure not only with ‘a human vision of the traditional skeletal, cowled death’ (Illuminated, p. 276), but also with a death that has taken on flesh and become sibylline.3 Although the heads to the right of the figure are sinking into the ground and while the figure is sitting within a dark forest that may lead into a tomb, its lips, nose and eyebrows indicate flesh rather than bone. If this figure can be equated with Eno, as the resemblance with Los, plate 1, suggests, then we can read it not as a depiction of death, but rather as the portrayal of a morbid prophetess, of a saviour who has become contaminated by the fallen visions she has beheld.4 The dark trees pressing down on her, the worm coiling about her body and her static position all suggest that she is tending towards degeneration. If this is the vision awaiting the traveller who enters death’s door on plate 17, then he appears to have entered neither a stony tomb nor a world of liberated energy, but rather an organic cavern that imprisons even as it brings life out of death. The worm which feeds upon the bodies of the dead is a far cry from the energetic serpent on the final plate of Thel, for example. Moreover, the descent into this macabre landscape confronts us with an admittedly pessimistic recognition of the interconnectedness of apparently unconnected things: ‘I have said to the Worm: Though art my mother & my sister’ (For Children, 18; E267). As Damon notes (p. 216), this caption is also taken from Job: ‘I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister’ (17.14). While Blake’s plate retains the moribund themes from this chapter of Job, the omission of ‘corruption’, which Job elsewhere links with his breath (17.1), is notable. It may suggest an uneasiness on Blake’s part concerning the association between breath and divine inspiration, established in Genesis 2.7, or it may indicate that the sibyl has not succumbed to the despair expressed by Job in the subsequent verse: ‘And where is now my hope? as for my hope, who shall see it?’ (17.15).

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The sibyl’s acknowledgement of family likeness with the worm, in a certain sense, sounds promisingly close to the declaration that ‘every thing that lives is Holy’, which resounds throughout The Marriage (8.10; E45), Visions (8.10; E51) and America (8.13; E54). However, it also anticipates Urizen’s woeful realisation that ‘life liv’d upon death’ (23.27; E81). Thus, the emphasis on movement, on the transitive, can be apprehended even in the final line, which stands midway between two proclamations: one sacred and the other moribund. However, it is important to realise that these avowals do not necessarily come from different places. While ‘every thing that lives is Holy’ implicitly refutes the priestly idea of damnation, so too life’s capacity for living on death undermines Urizen’s authority, ensuring that ‘no flesh nor spirit could keep / His iron laws one moment’ (Urizen, 23.25–6; E81). It is notable that it is not only the flesh, but also the spirit which is beyond legal restraint and as The Marriage makes clear such lusts and lack of obedience not only provide opposition to the imposition of moral policies, but also hold out the promise of redemption.

The first principle Plate 12 of The Marriage marks a distinction between two modes of vision, ‘infinite’ and ‘finite organical perception’. This occurs in the relation of a conversation between Blake, Isaiah and Ezekiel, in which Isaiah reports: I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded. & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. (E38) This passage anticipates the Painite conception of conscience in opposition to Lockean constructions of moral judgement that, as we have seen, Blake invokes in his critique of Watson. Notably, as in All Religions and No Natural Religion, the rejection of ‘organical perception’ is conjoined not to a rejection of empiricism per se, but rather to a redefinition of perception as a discovery of the infinite. What the passage does reject is the idea that God can be perceived as an external object existing independently from human beings, such as we find in a Platonic idea of the Good or in Swedenborg’s conception of the deity as the spiritual sun, as an entity whose separate existence implies a set of relations based on proximity (i.e. on an onto-theological relation expressed visibly in


terms of spatial dimensions). Isaiah’s conception of divine vision represents a significant modification of the blood theology we have encountered in the Moravians, but it retains the refusal to abstract the deity from the world of flesh. God has not again become invisible, but the visibility of the infinite that was once localised in Christ is here extended to include ‘every thing’. As in Boehme, the deity is characterised by a fundamental longing for manifestation, a desire that becomes realised in ‘existing beings or Men’ (16; E40) and in the production of inspired works of art, an idea that Blake, like Paine, acquires from Lowth who in his translation of Isaiah argues for a direct link between prophecy and poetry.5 Blake’s conversation with Isaiah and Ezekiel further addresses the issue of perception with Ezekiel telling Blake that ‘The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception’ and he continues by aligning the teachings of Israel with Blake’s own thoughts on the Poetic Genius (12; E39). The episode with Ezekiel and Isaiah immediately follows Blake’s account of the process by which the animation of objects ‘with Gods or Geniuses’ by the ‘Ancient Poets’ develops into a system of priestly imposition (11; E38).6 Thematically Ezekiel’s speech augments the account of the enslavement of the vulgar from plate 11, by describing the manner in which the ‘vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews’ (13; E39). That said, if the production of the plates occurred in the order Viscomi suggests (‘Swedenborg and Printmaking’, p. 27), then plates 12–13 were produced before plate 11 and although Blake refers to ‘genius’ throughout the text, it only occurs on one plate produced before this ‘Memorable Fancy’, on plates 22–4, where the Devil declares: The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius. and loving the greatest men best, those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God. (22–3; E43) Thematically, this plate, like Ezekiel’s speech, directly ties the idea of genius with God; however, whereas Ezekiel refers to the ‘Poetic Genius’ in its universal aspect as ‘our God’, the Devil on plates 22–4 particularises and at the same time universalises divine incarnation. Ezekiel’s discussion of human perception is the only place in the text where ‘Genius’ is coupled with the adjective ‘Poetic’ to create the noun phrase ‘Poetic Genius’, which could suggest that this Fancy is, via Ezekiel, referring us back to All Religions, where Blake first publicly announces

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the existence of ‘an universal Poetic Genius’ (E1). In both All Religions and The Marriage, Blake presents the Poetic Genius as the universal faculty that extends human understanding beyond the limits of finite perception. However, while the earlier text treats the universality of the Poetic Genius as unproblematic, The Marriage suggests that conceptualising this faculty in the abstract can, potentially, contribute to cultural and political subjugation, emblematised in the figure of David who, though he invokes the Poetic Genius, also ‘conquers enemies & governs kingdoms’ in its name (12–13; E39). This history of imperialism has more in common with the history described on plate 11 than with the worship of genius described by the Devil on plates 22–4 and it expresses an anxiety over the actual potential of the Poetic Genius to liberate. As the faculty which enables man to discover the infinite, the Poetic Genius enables Blake to reject the notion of an abstract and invisible God by incarnating the divine within the everyday experience of existing beings. But this process only works when the Poetic Genius is particularised and embodied in ‘the voice of honest indignation’ (12; E38). In the abstract, Blake seems to suggest, it risks becoming an agent of imposition and subjection.

Perception, liberty and organic light Blake’s belief in the redemptive potential of vision and his understanding of its ambiguous relation to liberty and bondage seem to have been central elements in both his thought and artistic production since the beginning of his artistic endeavours. In the seasonal poems, with which Poetical Sketches begins, the visual relationship between the speaker and each of the seasons reveals much both about the speaker’s hopes and fears, and about each season’s particular character. Thus, ‘all our longing eyes are turned / Up to [Spring’s] bright pavillions’, ‘we beheld / With joy, [Summer’s] ruddy limbs’, and Autumn ‘fled from our sight’, but ‘I dare not lift mine eyes [toward Winter]; / For he hath rear’d his sceptre o’er the world’ (‘To Spring’, ll. 6–7; ‘To Summer’, ll. 5–6; ‘To Autumn’, l.18; ‘To Winter’, l.7; E408–10). In the ‘Song’ which begins ‘How sweet I roam’d’ (E412), the fear of beholding exhibited in ‘To Winter’ becomes clearly understandable, for the relationship between vision and liberty is presented in its inverse form with captivating sights leading into captivity itself. The speaker’s consumption of ‘all the summer’s pride’ leads into a vision of ‘the prince of love’ (ll. 2–3; E412). Upon beholding the prince, the speaker effectively hands over his own faculties of sensation to this higher power, who ‘shew’d me lilies for my hair, / And blushing roses


for my brow’ (ll. 5–6; E413). This effectively removes his ability to determine the manner in which he will experience the world as he becomes the plaything of the prince, who quickly evolves into, or is revealed to be, the god Phoebus: ‘He led me through his gardens fair, / Where all his golden pleasures grow’ (ll. 7–8; E413). The speaker becomes immersed in a non-reciprocal exchange of desire, for the pleasures like the gardens belong solely to the prince. In allowing himself to be led in his visions and his pleasures, the speaker has already lost his liberty, and this loss becomes physically manifest in the final six lines of the poem: He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty. (ll. 11–16; E413) Ultimately, the speaker’s loss of liberty extends to his voice as he is reduced to a caged songbird possessed by the classical god of music, an image which may speak to Blake’s own anxieties over the limitations implied by aesthetic theories and artistic form. The poem does not suggest a way out of such imprisonment, but it does describe the manner in which this is effected. In particular, it foregrounds the importance of sensual liberty, depicting a progression of enslavement in which a captivation of the senses gradually reduces the self and its modes of expression to objects of someone else’s desire. Although the relationship between liberty and perception is an important element throughout Blake’s poetry, Visions provides what is perhaps Blake’s most developed and challenging attempt to explore the complexities involved in attaining, or at least approaching, sensual, political and religious liberty. While ‘How sweet I roam’d’, with its ‘blushing roses’, ‘prince’ and god of music suggests that humility, monarchy and religion are interlocking elements in the loss of liberty, Visions makes these connections explicit. In so doing, it posits a connection between Lockean empiricism and enslavement, at the same time suggesting that the reclamation of improved sensation alone is not enough. The sensual self must work towards the construction of a shared experiential reality before the prophetic impulse can be actualised. Numerous critics have discussed Oothoon’s function as an emblem of liberation, and of female liberation in particular. While there is

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disagreement about the extent to which she succeeds in liberating herself, the suggestion that this liberty is intimately connected with her sensuality is uncontroversial.7 In particular, the episode with Oothoon and the flower/nymph on plate 1 seems to suggest an awakening and embrace of sexuality with Oothoon’s plucking of the flower representing a voluntary and perhaps autonomous ‘deflowering’.8 Of particular relevance at present is the fact that this heightened sensuality is intimately connected with an ability to perceive the world’s spiritual and natural dimensions as well as a willingness to engage in dialogue: ‘I see thee now a flower; / Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed!’ (1.6–7; E46). On one hand, these lines can be read as declarations of Oothoon’s expanded vision, which unabashedly proclaim a perception of the world that does not exclude the magical or mythic aspects (the nymph) of ordinary objects (the flower). On the other hand, these proclamations also operate as questions, evoking a reply from the object of perception itself: The Golden nymph replied; pluck thou my flower Oothoon the mild Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight Can never pass away. (1.8–10; E46) Oothoon’s willingness to declare what she sees, rather than what she expects to see, leads her into dialogue with a being that can offer her instruction and, as Otto suggests, this leads to a ‘change of comportment (from withdrawal to embrace) that alters the appearance of her world’ (p. 24). Nevertheless, although the flower/nymph encourages Oothoon to pluck it, Oothoon herself seems to already be thinking along these lines, for she is the one who introduces the idea of plucking in the first place, though in a negative formulation: ‘I dare not pluck thee.’ Similarly, in order to receive the flower/nymph’s instruction Oothoon must already be exercising an expanded capacity for vision and a willingness to embrace alterity, otherwise she would have neither seen the nymph nor listened to its instructions. That said, although her encounter with the flower/nymph has helped to transform her own sensuality, Oothoon’s personal experience is intimately bound up with her social experience and the belief systems articulated by Bromion and Theotormon. Both Bromion and Theotormon display an awareness of the unknown comparable to Oothoon’s; however, Theotormon is too self-closed to listen to what Oothoon has to say, asking ‘what is the night or day to one o’erflowed with woe?’ (3.22; E47), while


Bromion externalises the power of infinite perception from the human breast to the ‘infinite microscope’, reduces joy to ‘riches and ease’, insists upon a totalising legal system with ‘one law for both the lion and the ox’, and denies existing beings the capacity to engage in the activities of Eternity: ‘is there not eternal fire, and eternal chains? / To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life?’ (4.16, 21–4; E48). Within the context of the poem, the limits of her world, Oothoon’s attempts to move from a self-closed perspective and enter into relationships with others are horrific and non-reciprocal. Bromion violently rapes her, possessing her in the same way that he possess the ‘soft American plains’ and ‘the swarthy children of the sun’ (1.20–1; E46). With her chosen lover, Theotormon, Oothoon has the opposite problem. He refuses to have any intercourse with her whatsoever, refusing to talk to her, let alone free her from the chain binding her to Bromion (which he may have forged himself). The only relationship which she can have with him is that of a mirror: ‘Theotormon severely smiles. her soul reflects the smile’ (2.19; E46). Worse still, it is the transformation of Oothoon from defiled virgin into ‘bleeding prey’ (2.17; E46) that provokes his smile. Earlier, in his annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms, Blake emphasises the importance of conversation within the approach to divine or spiritual knowledge: It is impossible to know God or heavenly things without conjunction with those who know God & heavenly things. therefore, all who converse in the spirit, converse with spirits. (p. 225; E600) Following this comment, Blake at one time included the caveat, ‘& these are either Good or Evil’ (ibid.), which seems to suggest that a variety of conversational productions are possible and that not all of these will produce redemptive effects. Although he later deleted this qualification, the idea that such spiritual conjunctions could be both good and bad is reinforced by his comment at the opening of the passage: ‘Man is bad or good. as he unites himself with bad or good spirits. tell me with whom you go & Ill tell you what you do’ (ibid.). Oothoon finds herself bound to those who do not share her prophetic vision and in the absence of companions with whom to ‘converse in spirit’, she is unable either to enter into a fully redeemed knowledge of the divine or to transform her observations into performative utterances capable of reshaping her social reality. Instead, her vision of liberated sexuality and the transgression of oppressive moral codes replicates rather than removes the possessiveness that functions as

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a constituent feature of Urizenic jealousy. Thus, Oothoon herself redeploys the ‘nets & gins & traps’ of the parson in a fantasy of spreading ‘silken nets and traps of adamant’ to catch ‘girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’ for Theotormon (5.18, 7.23–4; E49, 50). The image intended to illustrate her lack of jealousy, ‘Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e’er with jealous cloud / Come in the heaven of generous love’ (7.28–9; E50), itself depends upon the binding of others’ loves and her imposition of Theotormon’s desire onto the ‘wanton play’ of the girls bears an unsettling resemblance to the lustful imposition enacted upon her by Bromion. Nevertheless, although the acts of male violence and oppression in the poem limit Oothoon’s experience of love and desire, they also serve to clarify her perception of the erroneous epistemology that constrains her: ‘the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black’ (2.29; E47). Her almost impossible celebration of sexual energy, even in the face of Bromion’s violence and her lover’s subsequent rejection, coincides with an intellectual boldness that drives her towards the prolific abyss beyond the known world. ‘They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up’, she declares: And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle. And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. (2.31–4) But in this spectral existence beyond life, she is not confronted with the ‘eternal fire, and eternal chains’ described by Bromion (4.23; E48). Instead she sees the burning eye of Urizen, an act which itself bespeaks a higher-level of perception. Before sinking into the abyss her cries are limited to assertions of what she already knows, but after this her discourse becomes driven by questions: ‘With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk?’, ‘Does he who contemns poverty, and he who turns with abhorrence / From usury: feel the same passion or are they moved alike?’, and ‘With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer?’ (3.2, 5.10–11, 17; E47–9). This is not a rejection of experience as a source of knowledge, but rather an expansion of sensation, an interrogation of its limits that opens her eyes to the nexus of modernisation, imperialism and economic exploitation at the core of the Urizenic system. Oothoon’s naming of ‘Urizen’ the ‘Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven’ (5.3; E48) demonstrates her ability to consolidate the potentially


abstract system that enslaves her within a definite and perceivable form. Her description of the sun as ‘like an eye’ provides another example of her ability to see the same object in multiple ways – in this case, connecting the sun with the aspect of constant and oppressive surveillance enacted by figures such as Urizen. As Erdman points out, the illumination of this scene on the frontispiece presents us with what appears to be ‘a human face in the sky, with the straggling clusters of leaves that hang from the roof of the cave as locks of hair’ (Illuminated, p. 125). This seems to confirm Oothoon’s description of her world, at the same time suggesting the reader’s own internalisation of the Urizenic system: ‘from the viewers’ perspective, the cave edge and brow of foliage seem the skull socket and brow or our own eyes’ (ibid., p. 126). Moreover, the perspective of the image itself, which presents us with the interior side of the cavern’s walls, further suggests that we as viewers are occupying the same space as the figures in the text. Oothoon’s sense that the philosophy of the five senses fails to account for the social inequities she perceives in the world around her demonstrates an awareness of the interrelationship of social institutions, which runs across Blake’s texts. Larrissy points out that ‘Blake’s insight would not be so profound if it were not for his clear sense that human beings are constrained by ideologies and projections which, as individuals, they are not responsible for, and which may run counter to their interests and desires’ (William Blake, p. 4). Echoing him, Williams argues that ‘while it would be too facile to effect a one-to-one translation of Blake’s text[s] into the text of ideology-critique, I believe that such a group of words and concepts can be found in Blake’s text as demonstrates his contemplation and conscious deployment of the series of strategies that we have seen at work in the texts of ideology critics’ (Ideology and Utopia, p. 15). Like the speaker in ‘How sweet I roam’d’, Oothoon has come to acknowledge the reality of her own enslavement. However, her recognition of the significance of this captivity far surpasses that of the speaker in the earlier poem. Her description of herself as ‘A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity’ suggests an awareness that the consequences of oppression are not limited to the material inequities imposed on its victims, but actually affect, and indeed effect, the shared experiential space inhabited by both the oppressor and the oppressed (7.15; E50). Not only has Oothoon become that ‘phantom of the earth & of the water’, which we have seen before (Aphorisms, §533; E596), but she recognises this degradation for the imposition that it is and, even at the same time as her phantasies are constrained by her own experientially contingent condition, the extremity of her suffering itself seems to

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inform a newfound understanding of the spectral system that delineates her experience of the world. Notably, this system itself is generated by an economy of sacrifice – the sacrificing of oneself to another through, among other things, the practices of slavery, marriage, wage labour and church tithes. Disturbingly, it is her own willingness to become a propitiatory offering that unlocks her grief and initiates her public declamations against Urizen and his system: Oothoon weeps not: she cannot weep! her tears are locked up; But she can howl incessant writhing her soft snowy limbs. And calling Theotormon’s Eagles to prey upon her flesh. (2.11–13; E46) It is only by knowingly allowing her flesh to be rent, to be tortured for the gratification of another, that Oothoon’s grief can be transformed into something approaching redemptive vision and her incessant howls can become articulate expressions of social critique. Not only does this say something about Blake’s sense of the psychological effects of institutionalised trauma, but it also points towards a particular understanding of the relationship between suffering and prophecy, between distress and the human experience of the divine. In his earlier comments on the flyleaf of Divine Love, Blake declares, ‘If God is any thing he is understanding’; but this conception of understanding, also equated with thought, is formulated in a rather remarkable manner: Understanding or Thought is not natural to Man it is acquired by means of suffering & distress i.e. Experience. Will, Desire, Love, Rage, Envy, & all other Affections are Natural. but Understanding is Acquired But Observe. without these is to be less than Man. Man could never have received light from heaven without aid of the affections. (E602) The end of this paragraph, beginning with ‘Man could never have received light’, is, as Erdman notes, largely conjectural due to the fact that it has ‘been badly rubbed or erased’ (E884).9 But the entire passage is problematic, even if within its lines we might well perceive a certain modification in the unfolding of mystery, the embodiment of the divine. It is notable that the affections, which Swedenborg links with the divine influx, are here linked with what is natural, built into the very structure of the body. God, however, is equated with the understanding, which


may owe something to Swedenborg’s own alignment of understanding, faith and truth, but in a Swedenborgian context Blake’s formulation is counter-intuitive; it is not the intuition, nor even the conscience – which, as we have seen, Blake elsewhere directly connects with the divine voice – that is God, but rather God is experience. He is distress and suffering. The affections can, in a certain sense, be taken to be innate, natural, for Blake seems to imply that they are not ‘Acquired’, but God, in contrast, is acquired, constituted by the painful and distressing interactions of self and other. While The Marriage extends the visibility of the deity from Christ to all existing beings, on the flyleaf to Divine Love Blake seems to suggest that God not only acts and is within existing beings, but within those beings as they themselves are expressed or produced through interaction with others. The suffering of Christ in the flesh is thus supplanted by the suffering of the flesh in general and it is here that the problems with legibility come to the fore as Blake appears to be suggesting that this flesh itself, its natural body, is necessary in order to discover God in experience. Without the body’s affections, it seems, the interiorisation of divine light would itself not be possible: ‘Man could ?never [have received] ?light from heaven ?without [aid of the] affections’. Even if we could be sure that these are in fact Blake’s words, their implication in the context of what has come before remains elusive. The link between the divine light and the affections is certainly something that Blake could have acquired from Swedenborg, but the latter clearly links this love that is light with the spiritual as opposed to the natural. Blake almost seems to be doing the opposite, emphasising that the affections, the openings to the divine, are located in the (natural) body. But this is not a straightforward inversion. It is not enough to say that the body is a receptacle of the spirit, a necessary part in the communication between heaven and earth. Swedenborg himself seems to suggest as much. For Blake, the spiritual sun no longer exists beyond the natural sun; there is no world beyond the shadow-puppets dancing across the walls of corporeal existence. In equating the existence of God with experience, Blake expands the mysterium tremendum beyond all reasonable bounds. The crucifixion, the suffering and death of God, no longer motions towards a stable onto-theological ground that exists on the other side of death, but rather to the unpredictable fate of each and every life. The full implications of Blake’s half-expunged remarks would thus seem to read in the blood of a god an entirely new conception of divinity. God suffers and allows himself to be put to death not in order to compensate for the sins of humanity (indeed the doctrine of Atonement,

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the economy of sacrifice, is something that, in Milton and Jerusalem, Blake will consistently associate with the perversions associated with moral law), but rather because it is only in the understanding of such suffering, in the thought born of and borne by experience, that he exists at all. But perhaps this is taking things too far, reading too much into a fragmentary, and quite possibly spurious, spur-of-the-moment remark. What can be said, with reasonable impunity, is that while it is experience that allows us to acquire God in the form of understanding, it is the affections, which are themselves caught up in acts of sympathy, that allow us to transform ‘suffering & distress’ into the reception of divine light. Perception can lead us into knowledge, but that knowledge can only attain its redemptive potential if the senses are informed by the affections. It is Oothoon’s willingness to engage in a quasi-sexual encounter with the flower/nymph that allows her to transform her subsequent suffering at the hands of Bromion and Theotormon into something approaching redemptive perception and knowledge. But, somewhat distressingly, the unfolding of Visions would seem to suggest that it is through the horror of suffering, of physical and psychic disfigurement, that insight into the heart of the deity can be achieved. The mysterium tremendum implied by the mercy seat in Blake’s figure of man as the ark of God here takes on overtones both of sexual exploitation and a Promethean politics – and here it pays to recall Blake’s redefinition in the annotations to Watson, of prophecy as socially informed foresight (Annotations to Watson, p. 14; E6170). The crucifixion is thus translated from the suffering and death in the flesh of a lone God into the trials and tribulations of all flesh enfettered by moral impositions of every other who, like Christ, is imbued with the gift of the divine which manifests itself experientially through torment. The sense that Oothoon gleans invaluable insight through her horrific experience tends to support Makdisi’s claim that Urizenic modernisation, which can ‘be understood as the purest form of imperialism’ enacted in both the metropolitan centre and the colonial peripheries (162), itself provides the tools of its own annihilation: The Universal Empire works by crushing its victims in its tyrannic wheels, by enslaving women and children in Mills, by chaining men in ships ‘clos’d up,’ by pillaging and looting the peoples of three continents [. . .]. But it is precisely in the darkest and most terrifying visions of this cruel system that Blake sees hope. By chaining the ‘nations’ and peoples of humankind together, according to his vision, the Universal Empire has united them. [. . .]. [A]ccording to


Blake it is only at the very height of Empire that the possibility for destroying it can be imagined.10 The success of universal redemption and global emancipation, therefore, hinges not on the ability to return to an imagined state of pre-modern innocence but rather on humanity’s capacity to transform the weapons of oppression into the tools of liberation. On an intellectual level, this means transforming the mill of science through the recognition of its poetic or prophetic potential. On an economic level, meanwhile, this entails redirecting the energies of industrial manufactories so as to produce works that promote rather than restrict human freedom. By the time that he engraved Visions, Blake had already participated, though at some remove, in a project that sought to incorporate the most recent discoveries in the natural sciences with a politically responsible and morally revolutionary, social and historical commentary. Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, published in two parts as The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Economy of Vegetation (1791) provided an overview of natural history and the natural sciences, incorporated a wealth of knowledge and inventions surrounding the lunar society, of which Darwin was a member, and aimed to disseminate knowledge to a wide audience through the medium of poetry. Whilst Blake would have no doubt been uneasy about Darwin’s faith in the emancipatory powers of trade and industry, the emphasis on abolition and glorification of sexuality in the two books would have appealed to his sensibility and there is considerable evidence that he incorporated a number of Darwin’s ideas in his own artistic productions.11 Blake’s own involvement with the project included the provision of six engravings, two after Fuseli and four more depicting Wedgwood’s copy of the Portland Vase. Much note has already been taken of Blake’s adaptation of Fuseli’s The Fertilization of Egypt, but his engravings of the vase are themselves worthy of further attention.12 Though there is insufficient time at present to discuss these at length, Darwin’s remark that the vase depicts ‘what in antient times engaged the attention of philosophers, poets, and heroes [. . .] the Eleusinian mysteries’ and his subsequent commentary, which attempts to decipher emblems of mortality and immortality, makes this work in itself significant within the discussion of the unfolding of divine mystery.13 At present, however, the impact of Darwin on Blake’s ideas about the combination of philosophy and poetry in prophetic vision generally, and in regard to Oothoon specifically, merits further attention. Oothoon’s initial confusion over the ontological status of the flower/ nymph, ‘Art thou a flower! art thou a nymph!’ (Visions, 1.6; E46), is, as

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Worrall notes, ‘a confusion of sight’ (‘Blake and Darwin’, p. 405). But, as Oothoon’s reminiscences later in the text demonstrate, this confusion is historically relative, arising from the philosophical and religious world-views that, until the plucking of the marigold, have structured her sensual experience. In his discussion of the poem’s legend, ‘The Eye sees more than the Heart knows’ (ii; E45), Worrall argues that the idea of the superiority of sight over knowledge is compounded with ‘a further level of meaning embodied in the confrontation between Oothoon and the Marygold’ (‘Blake and Darwin’, p. 404). Reading the legend in the context of Oothoon’s statement, ‘thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks’ (1.13; E46), Worrall notes: Although the Eye is subject to light, it is in danger of remaining as passive as the Sunflower, or as Oothoon in her indecision. The Heart, however, is not subject to light (or to the visual confusions at first suffered by Oothoon) but is enclosed in the darkness of the breast; it must be given a visionary ‘glow’ while the Eye must clarify its perception with the light of ‘knowing’ that ‘the soul of sweet delight / Can never pass away’. (pp. 404–5) As we have seen this ‘knowing’ itself depends upon the ability to perceive the flower as nymph and the willingness to listen to what the nymph has to say. Thus, the heart, which Blake connects with both honesty and the affections, and the eye must work together to generate both understanding and enhanced perception. Worrall’s comments on Visions occur within a larger examination of the relation between Blake’s texts and scientific ideas represented in Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden and he presents a convincing case for regarding Botanic Garden as a text that was highly influential on Blake’s own artistic productions in the years 1791–95. Notably, Worrall suggests that ‘the most remarkable example of Blake’s “Darwinizing” with relation to botany concerns the Argument plate of Visions’ (p. 401). Drawing attention to Darwin’s discussion of the light discharged by certain flowers, such as the marigold, he suggests that Visions, plate iii, ‘illustrates not the sun rising behind a marygold (there is no disc visible) but steady flashes of light emitted from the marygold itself’ (p. 402). The fact that ‘the etched lines of radiation seem to dart from the heads of the two flowers pictured and from the heads (one above the other) of the human form of the flower and Oothoon’ participates in the idea that, having placed the flower ‘to glow between [her] breasts’ (1.12; E46), Oothoon ‘possesses her own inner source of radiation’


(pp. 402, 404). Blake’s decision to make the flower a marigold is therefore significant because it allows him to combine a scientifically verified phenomenon with ideas about prophetic or spiritual vision. The incorporation of scientific ideas about botany within his depiction of such vision would seem to undermine the opposition Blake draws between organic and infinite perception in the preceding illuminated books (particularly The Marriage and No Natural Religion). However, the dichotomisation of nature and spirit along with the concomitant representation of the latter as the only origin of divine light belongs more to Swedenborg than to Blake as it participates in the idea of prophecy as a withdrawal from the human world. I have already suggested that, through Oothoon, Blake presents a more socially engaged mode of prophecy appropriate to the turbulent political context of the 1790s. In view of this, the integration of observations from a poetically embodied science with the idea of prophetic light can be seen to work towards an effacement of the division between nature and spirit as well as between body and soul. But there is another sense in which Darwin’s discussion of the marigold is particularly apt within Blake’s prophetic endeavour. Rather than reinforcing a fixed and stable body of knowledge, the phenomenon of the flashing flowers signifies the first stages of a progression from the known to the unknown in that it represents something ‘Darwin was unable to explain’ (Worrall, ‘Blake and Darwin’, p. 402). The importance of the unexplained and of hypotheses or theories that have yet to be scientifically verified is something to which Darwin himself calls attention in the ‘Apology’ prefixed to Botanic Garden: It may be proper here to apologize for many of the subsequent conjectures [. . .] as not being supported by accurate investigation or conclusive experiments. Extravagant theories however [. . .] are not without their use; as they encourage the execution of laborious experiments, or the investigation of ingenius deductions [. . .]. And since natural objects are allied to each other by many affinities, every kind of theoretic distribution of them adds to our knowledge by developing some of their analogies. (p. vii) This passage calls to mind Blake’s own proverb that ‘Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth’ (The Marriage, 8; E37), suggesting an affinity between Blake’s emphasis on imaginative science and Darwin’s representation of scientific method. By incorporating ‘conjectures’ and ‘extravagant theories’ into his text, Darwin manages to avoid the circularity which Blake represents as one of the potential

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dangers of enlightenment science. Although it was suspected that electricity had something to do with the marigold’s emission of light, Darwin draws attention to the flashing flowers as a ‘curious subject [which] deserves further investigation’ (p. 137n). Here too we find a point of connection between Blake’s text and Darwin’s, for the representation of the glowing flower as a nymph could have been suggested by the latter’s poetic description of electricity as ‘Nymphs’ who ‘with sweet smile each opening flower invite, / and on its damask eyelids pour the light’ (p. 47, ll. 471–2). This passage is not describing the emission of light from flowers, but rather the effects of electricity on germination; however, this in itself has a broad parallel with Blake, for it suggests that the same sort of energy that is potentially responsible for the flower’s glow is intricately connected with the life of the organism itself. To a certain extent, therefore, we can read Oothoon’s experience of the glowing marigold as a representation of the first instance when she encounters, expresses and surpasses the limits of scientific knowledge. Initially, she perceives the flower and incorporates it into a world-view in which she dares not pluck it; but, rather than simply imposing her ideas and fears onto the flower, she engages with it imaginatively and ultimately this reshapes her understanding of ideas such as defilement and morality by bringing her into contact with the light of life that Blake, like Swedenborg, associates with divine (and highly eroticised) love. The fact that Blake drew upon ideas and imagery from a text which claims as its ‘design’ the attempt ‘to inlist [sic] Imagination under the banner of Science’ is significant (Botanic Garden, p. v). While we might expect Blake to react against Darwin’s attempt to ‘lead’ the ‘votaries’ of imagination ‘from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy’ (ibid.), there are elements in Darwin’s project that would have appealed to Blake. The potential value of Darwin’s project as described in the proem stems from its capacity to retrace the history of abstraction described on plate 11 of The Marriage. To the extent that his poetry succeeds in restoring the trees and flowers to ‘their original animality’, Darwin can be considered akin to the ‘ancient Poets’, who ‘animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses’ (The Marriage, 11; E38). That said, Darwin’s account of the transmutation of Gods and Goddesses into inanimate life forms differs from Blake’s in that it presupposes the prior and seemingly independent existence of such divine persons: Whereas P. OVIDIUS NASO , a great Necromancer in the famous Court of AUGUSTUS CAESAR, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and


even Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions. (p. v)14 For Blake this semblance is itself the result of the attempt ‘to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects’ (ibid.). Ovid’s Metamorphoses, under this view, occurs relatively late, for he is drawing upon a well-established mythological system. Nevertheless, while Ovid’s poetry describes the transmutation of the animate into the inanimate, Darwin’s text effectively reverses that process, humanising the natural world, which in a Blakean context functions as a restoration of not only liberty, but also fertility: ‘Where man is not nature is barren’ (The Marriage, 10; E38). Through a combination of text and image, Visions presents us with an examination of the relationship between perception and bondage as it occurs on both physical and mental levels. Moreover, it implicates its audience within a socio-political context that frustrates the redemptive potential of both vision and the embrace of alterity. From her initial encounter with the flower/nymph to the end of the poem, Oothoon demonstrates her ability to perceive an alternative world that is inaccessible to Bromion and Theotormon. While she retains the ability to see herself as ‘the crafty slave of selfish holiness’, she also perceives her capacity to be ‘Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears’ (6.20, 22; E50). Similarly, she is able to perceive, name and denounce the ‘Father of Jealousy’ (7.12; E50), the figurehead of the oppressive web that binds her. Nevertheless, her injunctions to ‘Arise and drink your bliss’ (8.10; E51) fail to enact a substantial change in either her social experience or her ontological perspective and her attempts to enter into a dialogue with Theotormon fail. Oothoon’s failure represents the refusal of both Theotormon and Bromion to engage with her in dialogue, thus frustrating her attempts to communicate her sense of a redeemed world. However, the illumination of the final plate opposes the pessimistic outcome of the narrative, by depicting Oothoon enwrapped in flames, flying with arms outstretched, eyes and mouth open. Below her sit three huddled figures who seem to represent three of the daughters of Albion who ‘hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs’ (8.13; E51). Notably, Oothoon is not looking down at them, but out of the text, almost as if she is looking at, and addressing, the audience rather than the characters in the poem. This posture is significant, suggesting that she is imploring us to move beyond the cavern in which the frontispiece situates us. We

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seem to be enjoined to embrace Oothoon in her vision of corporeal delight while at the same time, via the frontispiece, we are presented with a vision of the body as that which binds and is bound.

The bounding line Blake’s ambivalence over the human body participates in an overall concern with form that also manifests itself in his consciousness of the limits imposed by artistic media themselves. Larrissy notes Blake’s anxiety over the acts of ‘binding’ and ‘possession’, which appear to be inherent in fallen human nature and necessary for creation or generation in the fallen world. Not surprisingly, Larrissy’s discussion of Blake’s ‘binding’ pays particular attention to Europe, which depicts binding in Urizen’s majestic wielding of his compass, in the narrative itself which shows how this limiting figure sets himself up as God and ‘in the prefatory lines, where “Blake” discourses with a fairy’ (William Blake, p. 91). Remarking upon the Fairy’s description of the caverned man’s refusal to pass out of himself ‘what time he please’ because ‘stolen joys are sweet, & bread eaten in secret pleasant’, Larrissy notes that ‘humanity appears to be attracted by “bound” sexuality, rather than by the freedom which [. . .] would bring about a change in human nature’: [This] involved him in yet another characteristic ambivalence about form: in this case the form taken by human sexuality. Could it be that what was delightful about human love was intimately bound up with what was exclusive and potentially destructive in it? (Ibid.) The possessiveness and secrecy implicit in the eating of stolen bread could well be Blake’s comment on the perverted pleasure derived through transgression of prohibitions, a pleasure which itself depends upon the moral code that opens the possibility of this sort of violation. However, Blake’s decision to make ‘bread’ representative of erotic pleasure implies the sort of sexual communion found in his Swedenborgian and Moravian inheritance. Indeed, the sexual practices of the inner circle at Fetter Lane were kept secret from the wider congregation and public at large, as a matter of political expediency if nothing else.15 But within the circle itself, such practices would have been public knowledge, just as the private delights of conjugal love are known to the individuals involved. Secrecy thus becomes a question of proximity, and those whose eyes are opened to the sanctity of the sexual act are able to enter fully into the secret. Moreover, there is a sense in which the potential


possessiveness of sexual love preserves identity even as that is given over to a larger feeling of communion with the other. The temporary loss of self experienced during the union does not entail a loss of bodily integrity and thus, in a view of the self that does not divide the mental from the corporeal, personal identity is preserved. The drive to assimilate the other into the self, which Derrida following Nietzsche associates with the possession of private property,16 can, from another vantage, be compared to the possession of the prophet by the divine voice – a loss of identity that is, without paradox, central to the constitution of the prophetic identity itself. If God as divine influx is the understanding or thought that enters the self from without, this entrance as we have seen is facilitated by the very affections, desires and will without which an individual ceases to be human. Sexual possessiveness, the drive to bring the other into oneself, is the very impulse that opens the self to alterity, that renders it hospitable towards the other. The sweet taste of stolen bread ought not, therefore, to be confused with ‘the places of religion’ descried by Oothoon, where ‘the youth shut up from / The lustful joy. shall forget to generate. & create an amorous image / In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow’ (Visions, 7.5–8; E50). The concern over sexual possessiveness forms part of what Larrissy argues is an anxiety about form and structure in general. Although structure and literary conventions are necessary to poetic creation, they can have the potential not only to limit, but also to deaden the imagination. In his discussion of Thel’s complaint that there is ‘a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire’ (6.20; E6), Larrissy suggests that the limiting function shared by the hymen (sexual desire) and literary form (artistic desire) means that ‘in Blake’s anxious and ambivalent classification of barriers, the hymen takes its place alongside “bound”, “veil”, “outline”, “circumference”, “garment” and, of course, Urizen’s “horizon”’ (William Blake, p. 126). Viscomi also notes the conflation between sexual and artistic energies. He argues that, in The Marriage, Blake’s personification of ‘“Eternal Hell” [. . .] as a naked woman lustfully and shamelessly enwrapped in flames (plate 3) links creative fires to the sensual and physical’ (‘Swedenborg and Printmaking’, p. 37). Moreover, he points out that ‘Blake’s entering hell is entering the creative state, which for an artist must manifest itself materially, in his physical body and artwork’ (p. 38). Like Larrissy, Viscomi notes the importance Blake accords to the ‘bounding line’ as a concept that is translated from the medium of drawing into his ideas of both engraving and painting. He remarks that ‘though the firm outline was added last, it was fundamental and foundational, theoretically manifesting Blake’s first and most inspired

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thought’ and he describes ‘drawing’ as ‘both an act of discovery and the art of fixing and building upon what was found, without losing [. . .] the original image and impulse’ (Blake and the Idea, pp. 36–9, 43). Although Blake’s method of engraving directly onto the copper plate seems to have provided a way of marrying spontaneous discovery with the imposition of artistic fixity, the tension between a line that is expressive and one which is limiting appears central to his ideas concerning both the relationship between the artist and his or her medium and that which exists between the self and the other. As Larrissy notes, with reference to the Descriptive Catalogue, the bounding line can represent both the firm outline imposed by the artist and the means of asserting individual identity (William Blake, p. 84). The idea that the relation between artist and medium is intimately connected with the relation between self and other is similarly implied in Essick’s discussion of the relationship between language and speech in Blake’s poetic composition. Speaking of the necessity of employing an arbitrary or fallen language system, Essick argues that Blake’s own methods of composition work to overcome, rather than emphasise or reinforce, the boundary between meaning and semiotic form: In rapid or ecstatic speech, we enter unselfconsciously into the medium and do not sense a gap between thoughts and the words that seem to issue ‘from out the Portals’ of our brains [. . .]. Thus spoken language, more than any other semiotic medium, generates and almost seems to achieve that illusive and perhaps illusory ideal, the Adamic sign. Blake carried [. . .] this same marriage of conception and execution, into acts of writing that he felt to be motivated even if the signs he uses were arbitrary. [. . .]. His muse is a personification of the medium as lived experience. (Blake and Language, p. 185) Essick’s mention of ‘the Portals’ refers to his earlier discussion of the opening to Milton where Blake’s invocation of the muses describes a process of oral/aural communication that is concomitant with the act of graphic production (p. 183).17 Earlier in the same chapter, Essick explicitly connects Blake’s account of poetic inspiration with the incorporation of alterity within the self. Citing the invocations to various ‘muses’ in Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, Europe, Urizen, Los and Milton, he notes that Blake often represents his poetry as the product of an alterior source. Moreover, he argues that these invocations are not merely the result of ‘literary conventions’. Citing two letters to Thomas


Butts (in which Blake refers to the composition of a poem, probably Jerusalem, as being by dictation and describes his own role as nothing more than secretarial),18 Essick notes: ‘all these comments posit an otherness as origin, distinct from but in contact with the productive self’ (pp. 160–1). Below, I will suggest that this embrace of alterity in the process of artistic embodiment is meaningfully connected to the idea of the bounding line as well as to Blake’s understanding of the self open to redemption, particularly as this relates to the closeted self described by Locke. First, however, we must inquire into the development of the bounding line itself. Although Larrissy argues that ‘the idea of the “bounded” represents an acute paradox’ across Blake’s work (William Blake, p. 84), Viscomi suggests that ‘Blake’s opposition to indistinct forms’ may not have been ‘in full effect’ in Blake’s earlier texts (Blake and the Idea, p. 40). Larrissy and Viscomi are of course discussing slightly different issues, for while Blake’s emphasis on the bounding line is part of his larger anxieties about the potential limitations of form, artistic and otherwise, this anxiousness may precede the solidification of Blake’s ideas about graphic outline. What we can say with certainty is that clarity figures as an essential part of Blake’s conception of the sublime, which itself is both a mode of perception, ‘it is inspiration and vision’, and ‘the gift of God’ (Descriptive Catalogue, p. 45; E544). With these representations of the sublime as both the artist’s ‘vision’ and a divine ‘gift’, we seem to have arrived at another example of Blake’s conceptualisation of art as the joint production of self and other. According to this view, ‘the Writings of the Prophets’ contain ‘various sublime & Divine Images as seen in the Worlds of Vision’ (Vision of the Last Judgement, p. 69; E555). However, these ‘worlds’ are not ‘other’ in the sense that they are transcendent or otherwise divorced from the world of the artist, for Blake insists that the source of the sublime is to be found in everyday experience. Thus, in a letter to Cumberland written in December 1795, Blake provides a set of instructions on engraving and printing, so that Cumberland might ‘shew [. . .] that Peace & Plenty & Domestic Happiness is the Source of Sublime Art & prove to the Abstract Philosophers—that Enjoyment & not Abstinence is the food of Intellect’ (E700). This suggests a conception of the Sublime as the product of both perceptive genius and an active life, that is, the product of visionary perceptions that exceed the world as defined by the philosophy of the five senses. Not insignificantly, Blake mentions Locke by name earlier in the letter, in a passage which relates his own ideas about invention and execution to Lockean epistemology:

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the Genius that produces. these Designs can execute them in any manner. notwithstanding the pretended Philosophy which teaches that Execution is the power of One & Invention of Another—Locke says it i[s the] same faculty that Invents Judges, & I say he who can Invent can Execute. (E699) The union of invention and judgement, which Blake attributes to Locke, would seem to speak to Locke’s epistemological division of ideas into the simple and the complex. As noted above, Locke maintains that the simple ideas of sensation and reflection (itself a type of inward-looking perception) provide the foundation for all human knowledge; invention, in this model, occupies a secondary role that consists not in the creation but in the acts of compounding and dividing the original objects of sense: it is not in the Power of the most exalted Wit [. . .] to invent or frame one new simple Idea in the mind [. . .]. The Dominion of Man in this little World of his own Understanding, being [. . .] as it is in the great World of visible things; wherein his Power, however managed by Art and Skill, reaches no farther, than to compound and divide the Materials, that are made to his Hand; but can do nothing towards the making the least Particle of new Matter. (Essay, §2.2.2) In comparison, the judgement is involved in organising simple ideas into more complex modes which appear to alter our senses themselves. The example Locke provides is the perception of a globe of uniform colour which presents an image of ‘a flat Circle variously shadow’d, with several degrees of Light and Brightness coming to our Eyes’ (§2.9.8). This image, Locke argues, is the simple idea imprinted on our minds. However, our judgement, influenced by ‘habitual custom’, leads us to perceive the object as a convex object of uniform colour (ibid.). This second perception is often mistaken for the original perception, but Locke insists that it is not the product of sense, but of judgement. Locke takes pains to insist that judgement, like invention, cannot alter the simple ideas of sense, but can only compound them into more complex ideas (thus the flat and variously shaded circle is compounded into the complex idea of a uniformly coloured globe). Not only does this model restrict the creative and perceptive capacities of the human mind, but it also imposes the limits of the natural world on perception and judgement. The materials of invention become the analogues of material atoms (which are themselves conceptualised as ‘particles’


rather than powers) and the judgement becomes subject to ideas of ‘Space, Figure, and Motion’ (§2.9.9). Locke’s discussions of invention and judgement provide a precursor to the natural understanding criticised by Swedenborg and, following him, Blake. Although Blake’s ideas about prophecy efface the dichotomy which Swedenborg draws between nature and spirit, his continual privileging of infinite perception over the philosophy of five senses suggests that he retained Swedenborg’s suspicion of natural ideas, which are ‘derived from Space and Time’ and which Blake identifies with the ‘fallacies of darkness’ that ‘cast a bound about the infinite’ (Divine Love, §69; E604). That said, there are occasions when Locke appears to broach such bounds in a manner that seems congenial to Blake. Although invention is confined to a workspace constituted by pre-existing atomic ideas, Locke seems to suggest that it is, in a certain sense, capable of producing newness: ‘he that first invented Printing, or Etching, had an Idea of it in his Mind, before it ever existed’ (§2.22.9). The example Locke chooses seems likely to have caught Blake’s eye and it is not unreasonable to expect that he may have had it in mind while composing a letter concerned with techniques of engraving and printing. Nevertheless, the fact that Blake’s advice on printing and engraving is proffered for the sake of ‘Enjoyment’ rather than ‘Abstinence’ attests to a significant difference in the manner in which he and Locke conceive the relations among judgement, execution and desire. Blake’s description of ‘Enjoyment’ as the ‘food of Intellect’ participates in the conflation of desire and creative energy evident in texts such as The Marriage. In contrast, Locke advocates a disengagement from one’s desire and, indeed, he makes the capacity to suspend our desires a constituent feature of free will: ‘For during this suspension of any desire, before the will be determined to action, [. . .] we have opportunity to examine, view, and judge, of the good or evil of what we are going to do’ (§2.21.47). Thus, Locke not only promotes a disengagement from the very energy which Blake identifies with artistic genius, but this suspension of desire is itself undertaken with a view to opening a space in which the judgement can make a moral assessment of the situation. Locke’s notion of judgement thereby constrains action within a dichotomous moral code, the consideration of ‘good or evil’ consequences, and this runs contrary to the mode of prophetic production exemplified by Isaiah, who, we may recall, ‘cared not for consequences but wrote’ (The Marriage, 12; E38). It is perhaps unsurprising that when Locke considers the type of ‘rapid or ecstatic speech’ that Essick connects with Blake’s marriage

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of conception and execution, it is construed disapprovingly. Speaking of the error of enthusiasts, Locke declares: whatever groundless Opinion comes to settle it self strongly upon their Fancies, is an Illumination from the Spirit of GOD, and presently of divine Authority: And whatsoever odd Action they find in themselves a strong Inclination to do, that impulse is concluded to be a call or direction from Heaven, and must be obeyed; ’tis a Commission from above, and they cannot err in executing it. (§4.19.6) Blake, on the other hand, argues that if one purges superstition of hypocrisy, ‘then superstition will be honest feeling & God who loves all honest men. will lead [them] the poor enthusiast in the paths of holiness’ (Aphorisms, §605; E598). Although these remarks predate Blake’s reference to Locke in his letter to Cumberland by approximately seven years, the association of impulse with honesty appears in The Marriage and All Religions,19 both of which were printed or reprinted in the same year as Blake wrote this letter (1795). As we have seen, Lockean empiricism seems content to examine man as he exists within his closet, while Blake’s visionary materialism is constantly and relentlessly attempting to break down the barrier between self and other. Moreover, the distancing of the self from its environment implied by Locke’s epistemology is paralleled by his contempt for enthusiasm and his emphasis on a rational disengagement from desire. Nevertheless, the fact that, as Glausser points out, Locke was willing to put himself at immense personal risk for the causes he believed in (pp. 92–105), suggests not only that there is a place within his world-view for the self’s active engagement with its environment, but also that he believed such interaction could actually effect positive change. While this might seem at odds with the development and deployment of the punctual self throughout the Essay, his emphasis on disengagement and his reification of both mind and other result from a very Blakean concern over humanity’s tendency to slide into mental bondage and thence into physical enslavement. In particular, Locke seems to have an acute sense that his injunction for human beings to ‘think and know for themselves’ (Essay, §1.4.23) was continually threatened by the ease with which wrong principles could permeate the mind and establish themselves under the guise of universal truths. His depiction of received opinion as ‘borrowed-Wealth’, which ‘like Fairymoney, though it were Gold in the hand from which he received it, will be but Leaves and Dust when it comes to use’ (ibid.), is deceptively


dismissive. Locke’s concern is to redefine knowledge as that which each man must discover for himself: we may as rationally hope to see with other Mens Eyes, as to know by other Mens Understandings. So much as we our selves consider and comprehend of Truth and Reason, so much we possess of real and true Knowledge. The floating of other Mens Opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true. (Ibid.) However, the ethereal quality of these opinions does not detract from their destructive capacity. The majority of humanity, Locke tells us, ‘misimploy their power of Assent, by lazily enslaving their Minds, to the Dictates and Dominion of others’ (§1.4.22). In his Thoughts Concerning Education, first published within a year of the first edition of Essay, Locke would appear to continue along this theme, remarking that ‘of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education’.20 The paralleling of good and evil with useful and not useful already contains embedded within itself not only an incipient programme for social reform, but, as part of this, the deployment of morality as part of the ideological state apparatus that can be perceived both in Vincent’s Discourse and, from a critical standpoint, in works such as Blake’s ‘The Chimney Sweeper’.21 Nevertheless, despite the apparent concordance between the importance Locke places on education in Concerning Education and his rejection of innateness, the other one-tenth of humanity cannot be dismissed too quickly. When he comes to discuss those extraordinary individuals whose inborn virtues are all but impervious to alteration from without, he seems to invoke premises allegedly dismissed in the Essay: I confess, there are some men’s constitutions of body and mind so vigorous, and well fram’d by nature, that they need not much assistance from others: but by the strength of their natural genius, they are, from their cradles, carried towards what is excellent; and by the privilege of their happy constitutions, are able to do wonders. (Concerning Education, §1) This confession, made at the very opening of the text, stands in stark opposition to what Locke says elsewhere and further supports the above reading of caverned man as an epistemological and ontological response

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to a political anxiety over the susceptibility of the self to infiltration by the other. The vigorous ‘natural genius’ is written out of the Essay in favour of an epistemology that, according to Locke, can be most profitably applied to humanity as a whole, but here too there are discrepancies between the two texts, for education, Locke argues, ought to take account of individual propensity for ‘God has stamped certain characters upon mens [sic] minds, which like their shapes, may perhaps be a little mended, but can hardly be totally altered’ (Concerning Education, §66). In the Essay, then, Locke would seem to deny the very propensities, the characters stamped on every mind, which he himself acknowledges and which for Blake represent the latent source of redemption, the messianic impulse in every individual. Locke in this respect clearly behaves in the manner of a Blakean hypocrite, apparently deceiving himself – for the Essay is itself shot through with the sense of its author’s sincere rational belief – and then going on to deceive others. The consequences of this duplicity are farreaching, leaving the self almost entirely dependent on its environment and reducing personal identity to the sum total of the objects of memory. Such thinking paves the way for yet more deterministic representations of the body, such as we find in the materialistic psychology developed by Hartley and Priestley. The idea that the repetition of a particular set of ideas, communicated from beyond the self, actually affects the manner in which the brain functions suggests that indoctrination in and of itself can alter the physical make-up of the body and thereby alter irreparably the constitution of the mind. Blake’s image of the tree of mystery taking root inside the brain conveys much the same idea. However, Blake takes Locke’s project of intellectual demolition one stage further and refuses to accept uncritically the idea that rational thought is somehow immune to infection. Indeed, once one accepts the possibility that an outside opinion can infiltrate the brain such as to alter the way we think and perceive, to then turn around and make rational thought the only possible route to liberty would seem to be self-defeating. Williams presents a convincing argument that the conflation of fall and creation in Urizen ‘means that one has no recourse to an idea that is not already contaminated with the condition of fallenness’ (p. 17). Our examination of Blake’s annotations to Swedenborg’s Divine Love helps to fill out this reading by suggesting that natural thought is always already contaminated by the rigid spatial and temporal relationships communicated through shrunken senses and narrowed perceptions. The fiction of a material body that lacks the strength to resist corruption leaves the self subject to the external imposition of a moral system that


supplants each individual’s inborn sense of virtue, taken in the older Latinate sense of the word, with the moral dictates of an abstract God. In an all-encompassing irony, Lockean attempts to preserve the autonomy of the self are transformed in Urizen into the exact opposite. Viewed in this context, Blake’s emphasis on clarity of thought and vision can be considered as a remedy to the ‘dark net of infection’ that contaminates spiritual or poetic thought with the natural idea, allowing the individual to see through the ‘streaky slime’ and perceive the ‘woven hipocrisy’ (Urizen, 25.30, 33, 32; E82).

Outlining the vessels of Eternity But Blake’s critique of caverned man goes further than this, undercutting the very secrecy that constructions of the enlightened self tend to conceal. The self that steps outside itself to reflect on its sense perceptions and mental operations, that ‘radical subjectivity’ which makes possible ‘radical objectivity’ (see p. 29, Chapter 1 and Taylor, pp. 173–6), is precisely the entity threatened by what we might describe as the ideological affect, the imposition of external modes of behaviour and belief that seek to shape both the mind and the body. Blake’s apparent sense that the entirety of creation has been contaminated would seem to suggest a concept of ideology that reaches to the very core of each and every identity. However, such a conception itself depends upon a historically specific inward turn that presupposes a secret self for whom autonomy and impermeability represent an ideal state to which the possibility of personal freedom is indissolubly bound. In his discussion of the interiorisation of divine light within the Christian self, Derrida notes that the removal of secrecy itself involves a fundamental increase in secrecy: as soon as there is no longer any secret hidden from God or from the spiritual light that passes through every space, then a recess of spiritual subjectivity and of absolute interiority is constituted allowing secrecy to be formed within it. Subtracted from space, this incommensurable inside of the soul or the conscience, this inside without any outside carries with it both the end and the origin of the secret. Plus de secret. For if there were no absolutely heterogeneous interiority separate from objectivity, if there were no inside that could not be objectified, there would be no secrecy either. (Gift, p. 101; emphasis in original) In the alternative tradition feeding into what I have been calling Blake’s visionary materialism, however, there is, as we have seen, a tendency

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to open even the most secret recesses of the self. Absolute interiority in this tradition corresponds with a sense of the self’s thoroughgoing permeation by the other, a loving and erotically charged intercourse with the divine that occurs even when the self remains unaware. The process of redemption thus entails an awakening of the self’s awareness of itself and a public proclamation, and indeed celebration, of the knowledge that divine love, the force of creation itself, has penetrated to the furthest recesses of the soul. This is not entirely removed from what Derrida himself says elsewhere concerning the relationship between friendship and thought of/ for the other: there is thought for man only to the extent that it is thought of the other – and thought to the other qua thought of the mortal. Following the same logic, there is thought, there is thinking being – if, at least, thought must be the thought of the other – only in friendship. (Politics, p. 224; emphasis in original) Whilst Derrida will contrast, temporally at least, mortal thought with divine thought, in the alternative tradition of the mysterium tremendum that we have been tracing it is precisely the death of God that allows for the removal of secrecy and, in so doing, effects an onto-theological shift that closes the gap between the human and the divine. The opening of the self’s innermost space to alterity is precisely what allows for the entrance of newness, of inventions such as engraving (to use Locke’s example) into human experience. Moreover, while the fall depicted in Urizen is not fortunate, it is in a certain sense necessary, or more accurately its possibility is a constituent feature of Blakean Eternity. The other as absolutely other, the enemy with whom the self must actively engage both internally and externally, is a figure that cannot be removed without foreclosing the opening to alterity altogether. If, as Blake suggests in the preface to Milton, the remedy for corporeal war is mental war, then Urizen’s withdrawal and the violence this wreaks on the Eternal community is in itself a necessary act of self-differentiation, though his secrecy and attempts to subdue and annihilate alterity represent a perversion of this drive to preserve identity, a task that must therefore be taken up by Los. Discussing the ‘supplementary ruse’ by which two allegedly opposed models of friendship – the ‘private-invisibleillegible-apolitical’ and the ‘manifest-public-testimonial-political’ – are implicated one within the other, Derrida remarks on the third party that interrupts the dialogue between the self and the other within, between ‘I’ and ‘me’:


Does not my relation to the singularity of the other qua other, in effect, involve the law? Having come as a third party but always from the singularity of the other, does not the law command me to recognize the transcendent alterity of the other who can never be anything but the heterogeneous and singular, hence resistant to the very generality of the law? (Politics, p. 277) Through readings of Nietzsche and Kant, Derrida is here bringing the immense weight of Western philosophical thought concerning law to bear on the relation between self and other, a relation moreover that disrupts the distinctions between private and public, political and universal. Much more could be said on the way that this tradition intersects with the political and ethical aspects of Locke’s thought and Blake’s. At present, however, there are two points of convergence that warrant further consideration. The first is the relation between unity and variety, which will be discussed below. Of equal pertinence is the notion of a transcendent alterity, of the eye of God, that preserves identity by preventing the absolute assimilation of the other by the self, that does not confuse the splitting of the self into ‘I’ and ‘me’ with the interpenetration of self and other. This transcendence itself becomes embedded in experience, rendered non-abstract, in the opening of the present to whatever marks of newness the future, as an encounter with the absolute other, might bring. The aspect of law as the injunction of a transcendent other is, as we have seen, something that Blake continuously and vigorously resists. The holy law is contained within the ark, within the flesh of redeemed humanity, each member of which returns the gaze of the divine other, rendering it not mysterious and not transcendent. In this sense, visionary materialism comes close to the opposition that Deleuze perceives in Spinoza between ‘knowledge and morality, between the relation of command and obedience and the relation of the known and knowledge’ (p. 24). For Spinoza, Deleuze remarks, ‘Ethics, which is to say, a typology of immanent modes of existence, replaces Morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values’ (p. 23). The holy law is that inward virtue which, as we will see, Blake identifies with the stamina, the constitution of every individual which Locke not only acknowledges, but also proceeds to deny in a move that from a certain standpoint is akin to Peter’s denial of Christ. ‘Law, whether moral or social, does not provide us with any knowledge’, Deleuze writes: [. . .]. At worst, it prevents the formation of knowledge (the law of the tyrant). At best, it prepares for knowledge and makes it possible (the

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law of Abraham or of Christ). Between these two extremes, it takes the place of knowledge in those who, because of their mode of existence, are incapable of knowledge (the law of Moses). [. . .]. The tragedy of theology and its harmfulness are not just speculative [. . .]; they are owing to the practical confusion which theology instills [sic] in us between these two orders that differ in nature. [. . .]. In this [. . .] there is a confusion that compromises the whole of ontology; the history of a long error whereby the command is mistaken for something to be understood, obedience for knowledge itself, and Being for a Fiat. (Ibid.; emphasis in original) The history of just this sort of error is told in the books of Urizen, Ahania and Los, and, in the annotations to Lavater and Swedenborg, Blake argues that knowledge, acquired through the understanding as outlined above, must supersede all forms of institutional law (political, religious and, notably, philosophical). That said, Blake would seem to suggest that knowledge itself is secondary to the holy law that makes possible all acts of knowing – the law of Christ which, as The Marriage stresses repeatedly, is the energy of the body, the affections condemned by moralists and rationalists alike. Blake and Spinoza both seek to distinguish between two different aspects of being – the principles of existence and the injunction to obey – that are often yoked together under the general heading of ‘law’. Moreover, as Deleuze notes, for Spinoza such perception is empirical: [Spinoza refers] to the third eye, which enables one to see life beyond all false appearances, passions, and deaths. The virtues—humility, poverty, chastity, frugality—are required for this kind of vision, no longer as virtues that mutilate life, but as powers that penetrate it and become one with it. (p. 14) Though Blake’s concept of virtue differs markedly from Spinoza’s, this expansion of vision which facilitates the distinction between the moral law of death and the holy law of life can be clearly related to the importance he places on distinguishing truth from falsehood and recognising hypocrisy or self-deception in all of its guises. Blake defines hell as being ‘shut up in the possession of corporeal desires’, but whilst these ‘shortly weary the man for all life is holy’ (§309; E590), it is the enclosure or restraint, which prevents the active perception of the infinite in every thing, that constitutes the hellish experience. This idea of hell is itself indebted to Swedenborg’s conception of hell as an expression of


the extent to which the individual rejects the love of the deity (Divine Love, §10). But Blake modifies Swedenborg significantly. When the latter notes that ‘the Negation of God constitutes Hell, and in the Christian World the Negation of the Lord’s Divinity’, Blake glosses this as ‘the Negation of the Poetic Genius’, removing hell entirely from the domain of morality and reconfiguring it as a failure of perception, a denial of the first principle of perception, which, as we have seen, is also the source of all form – intellectual and corporeal. When Lavater asserts that ‘Who begins with severity, in judging of another, ends commonly with falsehood’ (Aphorisms, §36), Blake declares this ‘false’ and proclaims that ‘Severity of judgment is a great virtue’ (ibid.; E585). Such judgement is intimately connected with perception, with the ‘copiousness of glance’ that Blake identifies in Lavater and which, for Blake, represents the self’s appropriation of the divine gaze (Aphorisms, §94; E587). Lavater himself explicitly connects the penetrative gaze with one’s ontological state in a passage that Blake declares ‘A vision of the Eternal Now’: ‘Whatever is visible is the vessel or veil of the invisible past, present, future—as man penetrates to this more, or perceives it less, he raises or depresses his dignity of being’ (Aphorisms, §407; E592). In this sense, the visible seems to represent a barrier not dissimilar to the hymen, which, as Larrissy notes, ‘may seem both “bearer” and “barrier”’ (William Blake, p. 125). Although Lavater may or may not have had barriers such as the hymen in mind – his talk of penetration is suggestive but not conclusive – he does attribute this double sense to the visible, which is both ‘vessel’ and ‘veil’; that is, the visible both communicates and conceals. As Blake would have been well aware, the ability to receive the communication of the visible, to penetrate the veil as it were, is, for Lavater, intimately connected with the study of physiognomy. In Essays on Physiognomy, which Blake helped to engrave, Lavater defines ‘physiognomy’ as the study of the relations between the body’s surface, its ‘physionomy’, and its content or essence: Human Physionomy is, as I would have it understood—the exterior, the surface of Man [. . .]. Physiognomy would accordingly be, the Science of discovering the relation between the exterior and the interior—between the visible surface and the invisible spirit which it covers—between the animated, perceptible matter, and the imperceptible principle which impresses this character of life upon it—between the apparent effect, and the concealed cause which produces it.22

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In this sense, physiognomy works to overcome the limitations imposed by the empirical tradition as it is passed down from Locke to Priestley, which posits a world of knowable effects and unknowable causes. If one learns the relation between ‘visible surface’ and ‘invisible spirit’, then the visible passes from a limiting veil into a communicative vessel. This twofold aspect of the body has, I would contend, important implications for our understanding of Blake’s thoughts about outline. Lavater himself refers to ‘physionomy’ as ‘the surface and the outline of [man’s corporeal] organisation’ (ibid., p. 15) and we know that Blake had an interest in physiognomy (Bentley, Blake Books, p. 694) and was already applying this concept in his annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms in 1788. Similarly, the printing of All Religions, with its echoes of Aphorisms, suggests that Blake had Lavater’s ideas in mind for at least part of 1795, the year in which he posted his instructions on engraving to Cumberland. Moreover, both the printing of the tractate and the correspondence with Cumberland relate to Blake’s ongoing concerns regarding the communicative potential of the bounding line. The derivation of the ‘outward form of Man’ from ‘the Poetic Genius’, described in All Religions (E1), suggests a physiognomic or expressive relationship between body and genius. The letter to Cumberland similarly relates, though somewhat more obliquely, to Blake’s ideas about outline by virtue of its connection to Cumberland’s own Thoughts on Outline. The letter’s advice on engraving and printing forms part of a longstanding process of instruction and assistance for which Cumberland publicly thanks Blake in his appendix: one thing may be asserted of this work, which can be said of few others that have passed the hands of an engraver, which is, that Mr. Blake has condescended to take upon him the laborious office of making them, I may say, fac-similes of my originals: a compliment, from a man of his extraordinary genius and abilities, the highest, I believe, I shall ever receive:—and I am indebted to his generous partiality for the instruction which encouraged me to execute a great part of the plates myself; enabling me thereby to reduce considerably the price of the book.23 Cumberland’s glowing reference to Blake indicates that the latter played a significant role in the book’s development, while Blake’s enthusiastic response to the copy Cumberland sent him in 1796 indicates that the sense of gratitude and affinity was mutual.24 Indeed, there is much that Blake would have agreed with in Cumberland’s book, which was intended to correct the deficiencies of


modern art and taste occasioned by, among other things, the ‘seductive example of that elegant Artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (Outline, p. 30). While he notes that ‘mathematically speaking, there is no such thing as Outline’, he insists that ‘there can be no art without it, and that no man deserves to be called an Artist, who is defective in this best rudiment’ (pp. 8, 15). Cumberland’s discussion of outline shares an affinity with Blake’s emphasis on the importance of the bounding line, for although he distinguishes between outline and boundary, he maintains that the latter depends upon the former: notwithstanding, I see figure without Outline, I cannot describe it on paper, unless I begin with that process; and hence arises the beauty of shadows, and the pleasure they afford us, possessing a design bounded, yet without any Outline. (p. 15) Art that incorporates ‘perfect outline’ ought to be fostered, Cumberland maintains, so as to encourage ‘the productions of sensitive genius’ and teach the public ‘to pierce with the LYNX ’S eyes through the chaos of images, with which they are annually glutted to satiety’ (p. 5). Again, we find the notion of a penetrative gaze capable of moving from chaos to clarity. This loose resemblance between Cumberland’s image and Lavater’s, probably, is a coincidence. However, the stress Blake places on clarity as a component of the sublime would seem to imply a connection between art’s capacity to express the Eternal and the perfection of its outline. Cumberland describes the perfect outline as ‘fine, firm, flowing, and faint’ and he relates it to modes of expression, for ‘a course, thick, and irregular Outline, is, like a coarse mode of expression’ (p. 19). This attribution of an expressive function to outline in the graphic arts is by no means peculiar. Indeed, in 1794 William Robson devoted an entire book to the topic, Grammigraphia; or the Grammar of Drawing. Significantly, Robson suggests that the ability to draw depends upon lengthy study devoted to seeing the world differently: For while enlightened visible objects visit the Eyes of all, they produce sensations, according to the intelligence within, as different, as is the information conveyed in a language known, from what is communicated in one not understood. Without intellectual knowledge, the light admitted within cannot dispel the obscurity: and no more pleasure is derived from this wonderful representation, than the looking-glass is sensible of, which receives [. . .] without delight or information.25

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Recalling Cumberland’s suggestion that galleries devoted to the art of outline will improve the public’s vision to lynx-like proportions, the productions of an artist of ‘extraordinary genius and abilities’ such as ‘Mr. Blake’ can be expected to produce in their audience the most penetrative of gazes. This sounds rather like the claims Blake himself makes regarding the redemptive capacities of his art in texts such as The Marriage. Returning to Blake’s own hopes for Cumberland’s book (that it will ‘prove to the Abstract Philosophers—that Enjoyment & not Abstinence is the food of Intellect’), we find Blake’s desires realised both in the emphasis on the necessity of ‘Outline, or the nature of boundary [. . .] even where no actual line exists’ and in the Cumberland’s attempts to distinguish the ‘obscene inventions of that great genius, Hogarth’ from ‘the naked figures of [Antiquity’s] great Artists’ (pp. 26, 44). The emphasis on outline as the foundation of art, even in the face of its rejection by mathematics, presents form rather than abstraction as the production of genius. Similarly, the contrast between a prelapsarian appreciation of naked splendour and the attempts by ‘lewd hypocrisy’ to conceal or ‘fig-leaf’ the sexual organs is drawn with a view to replacing modern affectations of delicacy with an elevation of ‘the human form divine’ (pp. 44, 45). Cumberland’s use of this Blakean term, which first appears in two poems that between them contrast innocent and experienced modes of apprehending humanity,26 suggests that Blake may have been of some influence in this instance. Moreover, there appears to be a definite parallel between Blake’s declaration that ‘the genitals [are] Beauty’ (The Marriage, 10; E37) and Cumberland’s declaration that the women of Britain must be taught that ‘true modesty disdains not to examine, with a steady eye, the masculine parts’ (Outline, p. 45). Thoughts on Outline provides us with an expression of two ideas central to Blake’s thoughts on both art and humanity: the need for a firm, though not coarse or overly thick, outline and an approach to nudity and ‘playful’ sexuality that hearkens back to an uncorrupted aesthetic sense.27 Both of these ideas relate back to Blake’s thoughts on the relation between the redemptive self and the closeted or caverned self of Locke. Blake, like Locke, seems to feel a need to draw a firm distinction between the individual and his or her environment. This is necessary not only for the preservation of identity and variety, but also due to the preponderance of evil spirits eager to impose their natural ideas and sense of enclosure. Paradoxically, the sort of outline implied by Cumberland, and to a lesser extent by Robson, places the subject in a firm boundary that nevertheless suggests motion rather than containment,


expression rather than isolation, and innocent desire rather than lewd hypocrisy. Thus, the true draughtsman is able to produce and perceive the bounding line as an expression of energetic identity rather than as an impediment to interaction and conversation. Therefore, in drawing, both executed and perceived, the barrier is allowed to become the bearer and the expression of identity is united with the differentiation of one self from another: How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions. [. . .]. What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard and wirey line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions. Leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself[.] (Descriptive Catalogue, pp. 64–5; E550)

6 The Sublime Act

For Blake’s Isaiah, God had simply been an immanence, an incorporeal indignation; but Gibreel’s vision of the Supreme Being was not abstract in the least. He saw, sitting on the bed, a man of about the same age as himself, of medium height, fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper beard cropped close to the line of the jaw. What struck him most was that the apparition was balding, seemed to suffer from dandruff and wore glasses. This was not the Almighty he had expected. – Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses1 Blake’s ideas about energy, dynamism and opposition are predicated on a belief in divine immanence, which he seems to have inherited from his radical Protestant heritage but which also finds precedence in Spinozean ethics that equate substance with the immanence of God whose existence underpins all individual essences (1.D1–6). The inseparable correlative to his critique of the natural idea is his belief in the actuality of the poetic idea, which, via Swedenborg, comes to be associated with love and desire. However, it is in Lavater’s Aphorisms, which, as Viscomi suggests, served as a model for All Religions (Blake and the Idea, p. 195), that Blake encounters a succinct description of the relation between essence and external form as it manifests itself in unity and variety. Aphorisms opens with a command to ‘KNOW, in the first place, that mankind agree in essence, as they do in their limbs and senses’ (1). The second aphorism stresses individuality, but the assertion of difference is framed within an overarching implication of similitude: ‘Mankind differ as much in essence as they do in form, limbs, and senses—and only so, and not more’ (2; emphasis added). Blake describes these first two aphorisms as ‘true Christian philosophy far above all abstraction’ 171


(E584), and their influence is clearly felt in the early tractates. Although All Religions provides a more detailed description of difference, as the title suggests ‘All’ ultimately find their source in ‘One’ and the recognition of ‘infinite variety’ is conjoined with the realisation that ‘all men are alike’ (E1). His use of the definite article in statements such as ‘the Poetic Genius is the true Man’ and ‘The true Man is the source’ (ibid.; E1, 2) imposes a finitude on individual difference by locating its origin in the variable reception of the same. Similarly, the declaration that ‘all Religions & as all similars have one source’ (E2) underpins the celebration of infinite variety with the idea of an essential unity. When Lavater discusses the peculiarities of great figures, such as Luther, Calvin, Cromwell, Henry IV, Fenelon, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Rafael and Milton as the ‘Exuberance’ or ‘Leven’ which ‘raises each character, and makes it that which it shall be’, this instigates a lengthy commentary from Blake in which he endorses Lavater’s idea that the greatness of character inheres in its exuberance, but rejects the description of such exuberance as ‘oppressive’ (Aphorisms, §532). Moreover, in detailing his own thoughts on the matter, Blake moves seamlessly from considerations of the artistic to thoughts on the physiognomic: Variety does not necessarily suppose deformity, for a rose & a lilly. are various. & both beautiful Beauty is exuberant but not of ugliness but of beauty & if ugliness is adjoined to beauty it is not the exuberance of beauty. so if Rafael is hard & dry it is not his genius but an accident acquired for how can Substance & Accident be predicated of the same Essence! I cannot concieve But the substance gives tincture to the accident & makes it physiognomic Aphorism 47. speaks of the heterogeneous, which all extravagance is. but exuberance not. (E595–6) Blake here reverses the order that Spinoza assigns to substance and divine essence in his definition of God as ‘a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence’, and his description of ‘the essence of man’ as ‘constituted by certain modifications of God’s attributes’ (Ethics, 1.D6, 2.P10.Dem.). In reversing the primacy of substance and essence, Blake implies a redefinition of substance as the manifestation of essence – as the ascription of a visible quality, a ‘tincture’, to the essence, thereby transforming it from an internal and hidden secret into a public expression of identity.

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At the end of Lavater’s text, Blake defines ‘Accident’ as ‘the omission of act in self & the hindering of act in another’ and he declares that ‘To hinder another [. . .] is a restraint on action both in ourselves & in the person hinderd’ (pp. 226–7; E601). Moreover, in suggesting that ‘accident’ can be ‘acquired’ Blake seems to include it in the world of experience, of the distress and suffering that lead to divine understanding. But the passivity and restraint of the accident, the experience of the world constituted by the phantasmic relations of time and space, represents a perversion of the self’s relation to alterity, transforming the holy law taught by Christ into the codified imposition of morality. ‘The greatest of characters’, Lavater writes: [. . .] was he, who, free of all trifling accidental helps, could see objects through one grand immutable medium, [. . .] proof against illusion and time, [. . .] and invariably traced through all the fluctuation of things. (§16) Blake names this character ‘Christ’ (ibid.; E584), associating the castingoff of accident with the initiation of prophetic vision. However, the description of the substance as that which ‘gives tincture to the accident & makes it physiognomic’ implies not simply a connection with Eternity, but in particular with divine energy and motion. In the artistic context suggested by Blake’s reference to Rafael, the term ‘tincture’ carries the sense of colour or pigment, but through its conjunction with the ‘physiognomic’ it also communicates the idea of the infusion of particular qualities that relate the outward form to the inward essence. This, as Blake would have no doubt known, is the sense in which Boehme uses the term: ‘Men, Beasts, and Fowls, have the Tincture in them, for in the Beginning they were an Extraction [taken] from the Quality of the Stars and Elements by the Fiat’ (‘The Three Principles’, Works, I, p. 85). As the association with ‘the Stars’ suggests, the Tincture represents a portion of the divine fire, ‘for it is fiery; and the Tincture kindles the Body, with the Matrix of the Water, so that they are always boiling, [rising] and seething’ (ibid.). Given his knowledge of Boehme, it seems likely that, when he links essence, substance and tincture, Blake is infusing his discussion of artistic and human forms with the idea of a divine fire or energy. Thus, in giving tincture to the accident, the substance effectively redeems the self’s relationship with the other, transforming arbitrary imposition into a conflict or convergence of distinct and eternal identities. This idea of substance differs markedly from Locke’s, for it is no longer an imperceptible substratum that the mind supposes to exist by virtue


of the coincidence of a number of accidents (Essay, §2.23.2), but rather an enactment of identity that properly understood removes accident altogether. This redefinition of substance is paralleled by a re-evaluation of essence. While Lavater defines the ‘essence of humanity’ as an ‘inward sense of consequence—of all that is pertinent’ (Aphorisms, §47), for Blake the pertinent is the contrary of the exuberant and he accuses Lavater of making ‘every thing originate in its accident’ and of making ‘the vicious propensity <not only> a leading feature of the man but the Stamina on which all his virtues grow’ (p. 226; E601). Blake is perfectly prepared to admit that man is capable of evil as well as good, but he insists that the good or the active must not be confused with the bad, for ‘thus 2 contraries would. spring from one essence which is impossible’ (ibid.). ‘The or[i]gin of this mistake’, Blake insists, ‘in Lavater & his contemporaries, is, They suppose that Womans Love is Sin. in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are Sin’ (p. 227, E601). Lavater exalts his catalogue of sin for its ability to correct his tendency ‘to despise human nature in every individual’, but in Blake’s view this rationalisation of moral judgement merely disguises the problem: ‘Vice [. . .] is a Negative—It does not signify what the laws of Kings & Priests have calld Vice we who are philosophers ought not to call the Staminal Virtues of Humanity by the same name that we call the omissions of intellect springing from poverty’ (E601). Blake’s use of the terms ‘stamina’ and ‘staminal’ in this context is not insignificant. Lavater himself refers to the ‘stamina’ or ‘ingredients of character’ in a passage Blake declares ‘Most Excellent’ (§623; E599). However, the idea of the ‘stamina’ contains, as both would have been aware, a longstanding history in both botany and behmenist physiognomy. Proctor and Catieau’s Modern Dictionary of Arts and Sciences provides two definition of the stamina: [1.] In botany, those fine threads or capillaments growing up within the flowers or tulips, lilies and most other plants, round the style or pistil. [2.] In the natural body, [. . .] those simple original parts, which existed first in the embryo, or even in the seed, and by whose distinction, augmentation, and accretion, by additional juices, the animal body at its utmost bulk, is supposed to be formed.2 Thus, the stamina operates as an organic principle of organisation that exists in the organism from conception and outlines the form in which

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subsequent growth will occur. When Blake associates the stamina with ‘Virtue’ in his concluding remarks to Aphorisms, he renders this principle active, for ‘Virtue’ is itself defined as ‘all Act []’ (p. 226; E601). Thus, both the ability to act and the shape such action will take is staminal in the sense that it proceeds according to the shape of one’s essence, the mark of the divine infused into the body at the time of conception. Boehme’s notion of the ‘Signature’ or ‘Form of Life’ performs the same conceptual function as the ‘stamina’ in Lavater and Blake. ‘The Form of Life’, Boehme tells us, ‘is figured in the Time of the Fiat at the conception’ and the signature, the mark of that fiat, is that which, like the ‘substance’ described by Blake, renders outward form and act physiognomic: Man in his Speech, Will, and Behaviour, also with the Form of the Members which he has, and must use to that Signature, his inward Form is noted in the Form of his Face; and thus also is a Beast, an Herb, and the Trees; every Thing as it is inwardly [in its innate Virtue and Quality] so it is outwardly signed. (‘Signatura Rerum’, Works, IV, pp. 10, 11–12; bracketed text in original) The ‘Signature’ or ‘inward Form’ is not the same as the essence. Although it ‘stands in the Essence’, it is ‘no Spirit, but the Receptacle, Container, or Cabinet of the Spirit’ (ibid., p. 10). In this way, the signature anticipates Blake’s conceptualisation of the mind as the receptacle of divine influx, which he discusses in relation to Swedenborg’s notion of divine love. An examination of the Behmenist context out of which this idea proceeds not only contributes to an understanding of the manner in which the receptacle renders the form physiognomic, but also helps to elucidate Blake’s ideas about the transformation of evil into good. Because ‘Man’ as the ‘complete Image of God’ has ‘all the Forms of all the three Worlds [light, fire and love] lying in him’, and because the fall transforms the fire into wrath thereby introducing what fallen man perceives as evil, the signature is capable of receiving input from both good and evil essences: a good Man corrupts among evil Company, and [. . .] a good Herb cannot sufficiently shew its real genuine Virtue in a bad Soil; for in the good Man the hidden evil Instrument is awakened, and in the Herb a contrary Essence is received from the Earth; so that often the Good is changed into an Evil, and the Evil into a Good. (pp. 10–11)


Within each individual one of the three worlds is predominant – their ordering ‘is placed in him at his Incarnation’ and this is ‘marked externally in its outward Form, Signature, or Figure’ (pp. 10, 11). However, in conversation this order ‘may be broken’ and the self’s predominant aspect may find its ‘Power, Right, and Authority’ usurped by the dominant aspect of the other (p. 10). This usurpation, which can make an evil man repent or cause a good man to turn evil, is made possible by the affective power Boehme attributes to speech. The spoken word is itself an embodiment of the speaker’s spirit, which via the medium of ‘Sound or Speech’, enters the form of the hearer and ‘awakens’ within his bodily form a corresponding internal form (p. 9). Thus, the speaker’s form, embodied in his word, and the hearer’s form ‘mutually assimulate [sic] together in one Form, and then there is [. . .] one Spirit, and also one Understanding’ (ibid.). If the speaker’s form, which can be conceived ‘either in Good or Evil’, is strong enough to overpower the predominant form in the hearer, then the hearer will be reshaped in accordance with the form of the speaker (ibid.). Blake seems to be drawing on this idea of the affective power of speech in his remarks at the end of Aphorisms, where he describes the redemptive potential of conversing ‘in spirit’ and ‘with spirits’.3 Similarly, his notion that man contains a good part and an evil part (§489; E594) seems indebted to Boehme’s idea that the same form contains competing aspects or tendencies. However, Blake modifies Boehme’s model, translating the three worlds into the two contraries and thereby rendering man as twofold rather than threefold. Similarly, he places more emphasis on following the active impulse produced by the essence than in distinguishing between good and evil. Thus, he declares that ‘Every mans propensity ought to be calld his leading Virtue & his good Angel’ (p. 226; E601), and that ‘Active Evil is better than Passive Good’ (§409; E592). In his texts from the 1780s and ’90s, the function of Boehme’s ‘signature’ is incorporated into the Poetic Genius, which operates as the nexus linking the universal essence that drives creation with the individual identities that it creates. Although this essence is the source of outward form, the process of creation is not unidirectional, for God does not merely create the world as an entity distinct from himself but rather he ‘becomes as we are’ (No Natural Religion [b]; E3). This act of becoming occurs as an embodiment of the universal within the particular in which the essence is shaped by identity. The universal genius becomes possessed by each individual manifestation, as is indicated by Blake’s use of the possessive pronoun: ‘the forms of all things are derived from their Genius’ (All Religions; E1; emphasis added). Thus, the

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traits of the individual are transferred onto the universal impetus of creation, effecting a mediation between the universal and the personal. The human being is the place where substance redeems the accidental, where the prolific meets the devouring and where exuberance verges on extravagance. Desire compels men and women to seek what they lack in those around them, by encouraging them to participate actively in the formation of loving relationships: ‘It is the God in all that is our companion & friend, for our God himself says, you are my brother my sister & my mother’ (Aphorisms, §630; E599). Borrowing Otto’s term, we can describe the experience of God as an individual’s ‘comportment’ towards alterity: This [comportment] does not usher in a world of pure and unmediated presence, nor [. . .] does it suggest that we are able to grasp the other or his/her intentions once and for all. Nevertheless, it does open within the world of the self the possibility of engagement and therefore the possibility of transformation and of exodus. (p. 26) As Lavater points out, the medium which enables this opening is the relationship itself: As the medium of self-enjoyment, as the objects of love—so the value, the character, and the manner of existence in man—as his thou, so his I—penetrate the one and you know the other’. (§5) Such comportment depends upon a particular mode of self-knowledge which is self-aware but not vain: ‘Who forgets, and does not forget himself, in the joy of giving, and of accepting is sublime’ (§162). ‘The most sublime act is to set another before you’, Blake writes in The Marriage (7; E36). There is perhaps a twofold aspect to this act. Along with the act of preferment, of giving deference to the other, arises a certain question of visibility. On the one hand, setting the other, any other, before me would mean placing her or him in front of myself publicly, in the sight of every other. But, on the other hand, setting the other before me implies placing the other in front of me, bringing her or him into my own line of sight, opening my eyes and receiving the gifts of alterity – for in beholding the other, the self runs the risk of becoming what it beholds, it subjects itself to infiltration to the potential of interpenetration, of love: Lavater writes ‘He submits to be seen through a microscope, who suffers himself to be caught in a fit of passion’ and Blake remarks ‘such a one I dare love’ (§608; E588).


The sight of passion kindles that love within the self which Blake describes as the influx of the divine, that love which he will elsewhere remind Lavater ‘is life’ (§376; E591). But is there not also a sense in which the passion of the other involves an act of substitution, for in placing another before us, do we not submit that other to public scrutiny and censor? Putting another before me could in this sense be interpreted as letting my political ally, my brother, my friend, no less than my enemy, speak and suffer on my behalf, even to the point of death. The stakes of such substitution rise exponentially at times of political crisis when, in the name of preserving the security of the national and/or international community, the borders separating self from other, friend from enemy, are bolstered and rigorously policed amidst fears of infiltration or agitation from within. Substitution here becomes caught up in a particular manifestation of the economy of sacrifice, the creation and expulsion, detention or execution of the scapegoat who becomes the public face of the invisible enemy within. In the rhetoric and politics of terror and anti-terror that threaten to engulf our own world, today, in the conjuration of a spectral war on terror, waged openly and in secret, against an enemy both public and unseen, we can perhaps perceive another incarnation of the Reign of Terror and the waves of antijacobin trials and riots that swept through England in the 1790s. Blake himself, in the annotations to Watson, links the persecution of republicans such as Paine to the execution of Christ the ‘unbeliever’. And, as the gospel accounts make clear, the crucifixion itself involves a certain politics of substitution, not only in the question of whether the body of Barabbas will be handed over in exchange for that of Christ, but also in the public presentation of Christ as the visible symbol of imperial politics, of the exchange of power between the governed and their governors. Ecce Homo! ‘Behold the man!’, Pilate declares, setting Christ before the multitude: ‘Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your king? The chief priests answered, we have no king but Caesar’ ( John 19.5, 15). Christ is here substituted for a king that no longer exists, becoming the public face of unseen insurrection, the invisible threat against the body of the state and of Caesar: ‘If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend: whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar’ ( John 19.12). Again we are confronted by the spectre of friendship and enmity, for in order to befriend Caesar, Pilate must crucify a man who by his own admission is without fault. And more, in Luke the handing over of Christ to Herod is an act of reconciliation: ‘And the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together: for before they

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were at enmity between themselves’ (23.12). Christ here becomes a scapegoat in the oldest sense of the word, a sacrifice that restores harmony to the community by erasing the enmity between Pilate and Herod. But we must not overlook the other act of scapegoating in the text, the blaming of the Jews for the political execution of an insurrectionist and unbeliever. Beyond Pilate’s repeated attempts to transfer responsibility for the act onto the multitude, the gospel accounts themselves work to solidify the boundaries of a new Christian brotherhood in opposition to the Jewish enemy. Blake himself may not have escaped this contagion of anti-Semitism, but nor did he overlook the common fault embedded in the history adopted by both parties: ‘That the Jews assumed a right <Exclusively> to the benefits of God. will be a lasting witness against them. & the same will it be [of ] against Christians’ (Annotations to Watson, p. 8; E615). As we have seen, the crucifixion also comes to represent not only the persecution of the other, but the unconditional gift of love, given in passion, that is extended to all humanity. The death of one, whom The Marriage tells us we ‘ought to love [. . .] in the greatest degree’ (23; E43), disrupts the idealisation and idolation of self-sufficiency that the Enlightenment inherits from the philosophers of antiquity. ‘A logic of the gift thus withholds friendship from its philosophical interpretation’, Derrida writes: Imparting to it a new twist, at once both gentle and violent, this logic reorientates friendship, deflecting it towards what it should have been – what it immemorially will have been. This logic calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymemetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or received hospitality; in short, it calls friendship back to the irreducible precedence of the other. (Politics, p. 63) Christ as the example par excellence of the divine other shatters the foundations of caverned man, of the Lockean self from which we ourselves today continue to inherit. And this ontological, epistemological and theological shift – which Derrida shortly after quoting Blake on Hayley describes as ‘a seismic revolution in the political concept of friendship’ (Politics, p. 27) – occurs on two fronts. First, in the gift of its own death offered by the divine other, the self enters into a relationship constituted by lack or absence, by the certain knowledge that the other’s gift of love can never be fully returned. But, this sense of lack is interrelated with the kindling of desire, with the opening of the self to


receive the love of the other, the perception of which depends upon the self’s own active loving. Moreover, as we have seen in Chapters 3 and 4, such love involves both the interiorisation and the reciprocity of the penetrative gaze. To the materialist or transcendentalist the bounding line of identity represents a limit, and it is what is inside or outside that line that really matters; but for the visionary materialist this same line represents contact rather than seclusion. It is the point where self and other come together and if perception were extended throughout that line, rather than being limited to points where it breaks, then perception would be infinite. If we ask with Blake ‘What is man?’, the answer seems to be the manifestation of divine essence and unity through identity and variety. If we proceed to inquire into how sameness can manifest itself through difference, Blake tells us, ‘from one Essence may proceed many Identities as from one Affection may proceed. many thoughts’ (Divine Love, §27; E604). When Theotormon demands of Oothoon, ‘Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made?’ (Visions, 3.23; E47), he has missed the point, mistaking the acts of understanding for a metaphysical adhesive that provides a stable and fixed support for the accidents of perception. Substance, as Blake describes it in the annotations to Lavater, is not an underlying stratum, but rather a process of engagement and expression. ‘Human nature is the image of God’, Blake tells us and to deny this nature, to supplant it with an ethics of abstraction is not superstition, but self-deception, the forgiveness of which depends on sincere repentance (§554; E597). In response to Lavater’s warning to ‘Expect the secret resentment of him whom your forgiveness has impressed with a sense of his inferiority’, Blake replies: ‘If you expect his resentment you do not forgive him now [. . .] forgiveness of enemies can only come upon their repentance’ (§401; E592). For Blake enmity has its source in deception of both self and other. All of Blake’s enemies are hypocrites in this sense of the word and without a genuine change of heart they cannot participate in the exchange love, however unequal, between self and other. ‘The superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities’, Lavater writes, but Blake deletes ‘superstitious’ replacing it with ‘hypocrite’ and remarks that ‘A man must first decieve himself before he is Superstitious & so he is a hypocrite’ (§342; E591). The hypocrite’s fundamental error is in misrepresenting his own desires, his god, as an inferior being, such as the natural phantasm or a conception of God abstracted from humanity, and this necessarily has an adverse affect on his or her relationship with others. Thus, in seeking ‘hypocrite modesty’,

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Theotormon becomes ‘a sick mans dream’ and he transforms Oothoon into ‘the crafty slave of selfish holiness’ (Visions, 6.17, 19–20; E50). The phantasy precedes the imposition and Blake has no time for impostors, for those who seek to preserve a secret self, because the perception of God in every thing depends upon the accurate perception of identity. This then is the limit of a certain ethics of love, of the embrace of the other, and when Lavater comments on ‘a manner of forgiving so divine, that you are ready to embrace the offender for having called it forth’, Blake remarks, ‘this I cannot conceive’ (§400; E592). Divine forgiveness in Blake’s conception involves an active response to the particularisation of genius which, as we have seen, is represented in All Religions as inhering in human weakness, a point which grounds Blake’s unification of cause and effect: ‘God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes for he is become a worm that he may nourish the weak’ (Aphorisms, §630; E599). The influx of divine affection is required in order to fill a lack or absence and thus creation can be represented as the dialectic between form and content or, put differently, between substance (i.e. the manifestation of divine essence) and accident (i.e. the phantasmic relations of time and space). This is not the same as saying that Blake is presenting us with a vision of unpresentability because such presence is not to be imagined as existing somewhere else, for the very idea of distance is produced by the phantasy of space-time. Lavater writes ‘Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man’, and Blake signals his approval by underscoring the last ten words (§408; E592).

Incarnations and inheritance The impact and continued relevance of Blake’s works on subsequent generations of readers and writers is becoming increasingly recognised.4 His complex response to a variety of factors – such as the development of new technologies; the increasing effectiveness of the scientific method and the concomitant growth of its authority; changes in economic theory, policy and practice; as well as changing systems of government and social conditions – provides a wealth of material for researchers seeking to place contemporary debates over gender, race, imperialism and ideology within a historical context.5 The focus of this study has been slightly different. Nevertheless, the investigation of Blake’s ideas and anxieties about liberty, epistemology and the relationship between self and other has continued relevance in the increasingly global relations of contemporary society. In particular, Blake’s struggle


to create a mode of perception capable of sustaining hope and love – of promoting the embrace of alterity – in the midst of fear seems as relevant at the opening of the twenty-first century as in the final decades of the eighteenth. It has not been the purpose of this study to argue that Blake’s works provide solutions to the travails of modern individuals and societies. That said, the predicaments, conflicts and anxieties that occupied Blake are not entirely dissimilar to our own. This connection is especially poignant in his attempts to provide a vision of spiritual and material progress within a world where spiritual ideas are ossified into religious impositions, where the interpretation of sacred texts generates cultural imperialism and holy war, and where the endeavour for liberty must exist within bounds delineated by the necessaries of existence. Thus, it is, perhaps, unsurprising to find Blake among the literary precursors whom Rushdie acknowledges at the end of the Satanic Verses, a text which itself presents a sustained interrogation of religious ideas and authority. The contrast between the sense of God as an immanence, attributed to Blake, and the rather more mundane old man perceived by the delusional Gibreel provides a particularly apt entrance into summary discussions of Blake’s ideas concerning divine form. Rushdie seems to suggest that while the conceptualisation of the deity as a power or feeling implies a movement towards abstraction, there is something startling or unexpected in the depiction of God as a man. How are we to recognise the sublime countenance of God within a body that is not only ordinary, but subject to the effects of time, as well as aesthetic imperfections such as dandruff? What steps must be taken to locate divine glory in the figure, to give Rushdie’s example, of ‘a myopic scrivener’ (p. 319)? Such questions result from difficulties inherent in the concept of incarnation; that is, the issues arising from the embodiment of divinity within a body of flesh subject to weakness, suffering and death. The distinction between the divine immanence and the depiction of the very fallible God seen by Gibreel represents a contrast between the vision expressed by Blake’s Isaiah and the hallucination of Rushdie’s fictional character (Gibreel), who, as a result of mental illness, sees himself as the exclusive agent of divine inspiration and vengeance. In fact, the tension between, on the one hand, the egalitarian impulse to universalise God and to open the experience of divinity to all and, on the other hand, the desire to personalise and to particularise this experience is evident in The Marriage itself. On one side are Isaiah and Ezekiel, whose concept of the supreme and exclusive source leads to cultural

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subjugation: ‘all nations believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what greater subjection can be’ (13; E39). On the other is the devil in the final ‘Memorable Fancy’ (22–4; E43–4), who insists that God exists only in the particular form of individual human genius. Ultimately, the devil’s perspective seems to be endowed with the greater persuasive force. While his arguments manage to transform the Swedenborgian Angel into the narrator’s ‘particular friend’ (24; E44), Isaiah and Ezekiel revert to an extreme asceticism that is at odds with the text’s overall extollation of desire and enjoyment: I [. . .] asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years? he answerd, the same that made our friend Diogenes the Grecian. I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answerd the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite. (13; E39) We can surmise that Blake would himself have endorsed Isaiah’s description of prophetic activity and Ezekiel’s desire for infinite perception. However, the association of Isaiah’s actions with the cynicism of Diogenes and the absence of an explanation as to how Ezekiel’s unusual and, one might say, ridiculous practice of eating dung will raise men’s perceptions suggest that while the two prophets provide examples of genius incarnate, their peculiarity is somewhat barren. Isaiah’s ascetic renunciation of clothing and footwear would seem to participate in ‘The self enjoyings of self denial’ decried so passionately in Visions (7.9; E50); similarly, Ezekiel’s acts associate him with consumption – and indeed with the devouring of excrement – rather than production, while the fact that he ‘lay so long’ connotes a passive rather than an active response to genius. Conversely, the oppositional dialogue initiated by the Devil in the final ‘Fancy’ is imbued with a transformative power that provides a companion for the narrator, presumably Blake, and thus facilitates the act of diabolical exegesis and the production of ‘The Bible of Hell’ (24; E44). The generation of ‘infernal or diabolical sense’ and the production of a satanic text are not unrelated to the twin problems of conceiving immanence without abstraction and retaining a sense of messianic purpose without sliding into the angelic arrogance for which Blake criticises Swedenborg. Williams argues: This final Fancy brings friendship to the point of almost complete identification, Angel become [sic] Devil, the triad closed with the


collapsing of narrator and Angel/Devil in the person of a ‘we’ whose reading procedures are undifferentiated. (p. 217) From this perspective, which Williams himself labels ‘postmodern’, the redemptive productions expressed in this Fancy contradict the subsequent maxim that ‘One Law for the Lion & the Ox is Oppression’ (24; E44; quoted in Williams, p. 217). Thus, The Marriage appears to end with a contradiction and, more damagingly, with the promise of a totalising discourse that demonstrates the negative attributes for which Blake criticises both Swedenborg and Locke: self-closure and imposition. Williams presents a sustained, insightful and, for the most part, convincing reading of Blake’s poetry. However, there are several points which need to be raised regarding his reading of this particular Fancy. First, while Blake’s texts seem particularly open to the readings favoured by postmodern criticism, depictions of Blake as a postmodernist or even as a precursor to this type of thought run the risk of failing to account for the underlying spiritual basis of his thought. In all fairness, Williams’ argument is as much a Blakean critique of postmodernism as it is a postmodernist reading of Blake. Nevertheless, his suggestion that spiritual unity operates as a totalising force overlooks the fundamental role Blake attributes to variety in the generation of identity. Similarly, the idea that such identity is ‘constructed’ (Williams, p. 219) stands at odds with Blake’s own emphasis on the organic growth of the individual and the physiognomic idea of form, in which the internal essence manifests itself in the external outline. Moreover, Blake’s idea of redemptive exegesis, like his thoughts on the messianic potential of dialogue, is premised on the notion of an interaction between self and other. This point is underscored by Larrissy, who notes that ‘the “firm perswasion” of the honest prophet is not characterized by the univocal, but by the polyphonic, and by the overcoming of barriers between genres and senses’ (‘Printing and Repetition’, p. 64). Throughout Blake’s early work, we find a recurrent emphasis on embodiment, on the primacy of experience, on dialogue and on the need for prophecy to direct its gaze outwards to the world of social relations. Moreover, while he appears more than willing to embroil himself in doctrinal disputes, his partisanship does not render his vision exclusive. Thus, in a text such as Visions, where Lockean empiricism is attacked as an implement of priests and kings, the idea of divine light is integrated with phenomena related by Darwin in his enlistment of poetry under the banner of science. In keeping with his emphasis on engaging with, rather than turning away from, alterity, Blake is fully

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prepared to utilise the imagery and ideas propagated by both the newly emergent sciences and the occult traditions of Boehme and Swedenborg. His doctrine of contraries carries the marks of both Priestley and Boehme and his ‘Tree of Mystery’ is emblematic of his concern over the imposition of natural/religious phantasies, at the same time expressing Lockean anxieties over the imbibing of wrong opinions. Similarly, his ideas about the relation between freedom and boundaries incorporate botanical ideas about the stamina, the physiognomical ideas of Lavater, Swedenborg’s ideas about divine influx, as well as an almost neoclassical emphasis on the importance of outline. Blake’s emphasis on clarity of vision proceeds from an overarching empirical impulse that seeks to expunge obscurity in art, philosophy, religion and politics in favour of a visionary materialism capable of perceiving unity within variety, infinity within particularity and, ultimately, divine essence within human bodies. The grafting of the ‘poetic idea’, described in the annotations to Divine Love, onto the concept of artistic genius would seem to imply an association between textual creation and redemptive desire and the annotations to Aphorisms also anticipate the idea that the corporeal creations of the Poetic Genius can be related to textual production. When Lavater remarks that ‘A GOD, an ANIMAL, a PLANT, are not companions of man’ (§630), Blake’s initial response is to question the assumption that God exists as a separate entity: ‘It is the God in all that is our companion & friend [. . .]. Whoso dwelleth in love dwelleth in God & God in him’ (§630; E599). He then conceptualises this ‘dwelling in love’ in terms of the logos: ‘our Lord is the word of God & every thing on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God’ (ibid.). Conceptualising the thing as the word reconfigures the relationship between form and essence, scripting creation as the unfolding of divine discourse. In this way, the embodiment of unity in variety is the very process which prevents the universe from slipping into chaos by allowing it to be read as a coherent text. Moreover, the relationship between substance and accident can be understood in terms of the communication of meaning, in which the accidental qualities acquired by the form (i.e. its set of spatio-temporal relationships) serve as points of reference that position the substance within the unfolding of creation as a whole. Thus, the form is now fully realised as physiognomic, for the accident has been tinctured by the semantic essence of Eternity. These ideas about genius, creation and redemption are materially embodied in the practice of illuminated printing. Since the unfolding of creation through time can be conceived in terms of textual production, Blake is able to


claim a redemptive potential for his own productions of genius. ‘Printing in the infernal method’ will indeed facilitate the removal of ‘the cherub with his flaming sword’ because the creation of an illuminated book is the same kind of act as the production of a universe (The Marriage, 14; E39). The ascription of a messianic capacity to the process of printing is not unique to Blake. On a political level, the printing press allows for a rapid and widespread dissemination of political ideas, which was as significant in the 1790s as it had been in the mid-seventeenth century. On a more spiritual or religious level, not only did printing allow for relatively inexpensive productions of sacred texts (orthodox and unorthodox alike), but also there is a sense in which many of the errors in the biblical text could have been avoided had the sacred authors been able to use print technology rather than being forced to rely on scribes. Thus, Brothers attributes scriptural decay to ‘hasty copies in writing, before the more exact method of Printing’ (A Revealed Knowledge, II, iii). On one hand, the implication of fixity and repetition seems at odds with Blake’s emphasis on dynamism and newness. However, as Larrissy points out, the idea of repetition is of central importance to Blake’s ideas about the redemptive potential of art: For Blake, printing as repetition is explicitly linked to questions about influence, originality and the redemption of time. For while we are bound to repeat in the world of time, the difference between a time that can open into Eternity and a time that cannot conceive of such an opening is the most important difference that can be perceived. The former is a repetition that is always new, the latter the repetition of weariness and despair. (‘Printing and Repetition’, pp. 68–9) Larrissy’s remarks concerning repetition point us towards another permutation of this relation in which similitude opens into difference. Blake expresses his ideas about repetition most strongly in later works such as the Descriptive Catalogue where he declares: ‘we see the same characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men’ (p. 9; E532). However, the reference to the repetition of ‘the same dull round over again’, in No Natural Religion [b] (E3), suggests he was already considering such ideas as early as 1788. While this text speaks to the notion of a negative iteration resulting from the divorce of ‘Philosophy’ from ‘Prophetic Character’ (ibid.), Blake would have encountered a positive description of the role played by repetition in the products of genius in Lavater: ‘True genius repeats itself for ever,

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and never repeats itself—one ever varied sense beams novelty on all, and speaks the same’ (Aphorisms, §138). Although Blake does not explicitly refer to the idea of a repetition capable of opening time to Eternity prior to the Descriptive Catalogue, this reference is itself couched in the same language as the annotations to Aphorisms: ‘nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay’ (Descriptive Catalogue, pp. 9–10; E532). Blake’s association of accident with the fluctuations of time and of substance with divine essence suggest a temporal aspect to the relation between variety and unity. Notably, the dialectic between variance and unity is embodied in the process of illuminated printing itself. Viscomi argues that ‘variety does seem to have been deliberately introduced into the printing itself, since formats and even tactile surface varied with each printing session’ (Blake and the Idea, p. 166). However, he also notes that ‘impressions from the same printing session were printed the same’ and that ‘copies of an edition vary one from the other because it was almost impossible to avoid variance, given the mode of production’, which was ‘relatively large by cottage industry standards’ (pp. 166, 167). This suggests that while Blake was perfectly prepared to admit variety amongst copies produced during the same printing session and to introduce differences from one printing session to the next, the uniqueness of each copy results in part from the process of printing multiple copies rather than producing a single work of art. In this context, Blake’s comments in the Descriptive Catalogue, which suggest that variance is the product of ‘accident’ rather than the ‘substance’ of vision, can be seen as a summation of the effects produced by the method of printmaking he had been employing since 1788, the year in which these terms first appeared (in the annotations to Aphorisms). Of particular interest to discussions of printing and repetition are Blake’s remarks on miracles, which achieve fullest expression in his attempts to bring Paine into the prophetic fold: Is it a greater miracle to feed five thousand men with five loaves than to overthrow all the armies of Europe with a small pamphlet. look over the events of your own life & if you do not find that you have both done such miracles & lived by such you do not see as I do True I cannot do a miracle thro experiment & to domineer over & prove to others my superior power as neither could Christ But I can & do work such as both astonish & comfort me & mine How can Paine the worker of miracles ever doubt Christs in the above sense of the word


miracle But how can Watson ever believe the above sense of a miracle who considers it as an arbitrary act of the agent upon an unbelieving patient. whereas the Gospel says that Christ could not do a miracle because of Unbelief[.] (Annotations to Watson’s Apology, pp. 12–13; E617) Blake’s rejection of the miracle as ‘an arbitrary act’, together with the stress he places upon the role of belief, suggests a connection between the miraculous and the ‘firm perswasion’ described in The Marriage (12–13; E38–9). The reference to Paine’s pamphlet, meanwhile, explicitly links the capability to work miracles with the power of the printing press for it is the iterability of the pamphlet that grants it its political force. How then are we to go about perceiving the divine image in human form? On one level, Blake suggests that divine embodiment is displayed through the practice of bringing astonishment and comfort to friends and family, ‘me & mine’. Returning to The Marriage, we find that the ‘comforter’ is ‘desire’ (6; E35), the sexual energy that compels us to enter into relationships and the sense of indignation that drives us to an active engagement with our environment. Discussing Blake’s ideas about corporeality, Ferber suggests that ‘perhaps in this age, though we see it wrongly as a Body, our circumference and the circumference of others generate energy through mutual interpenetration’ (p. 89). This takes us some way towards conceiving Blake’s ideas about relationship, interaction and form. But the image of the circumference is somewhat misleading, for not only is it necessary for human beings to perceive the world in relation to themselves, ‘Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness’ (Divine Love, §11; E603), but the human body is itself a manifestation of divine form: ‘God is a man not because he is so percievd by man but because he is the creator of man’ (ibid.). When perceived clearly, that body itself displays the very qualities Blake looked for in art: ‘The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion’ (The Marriage, 10; E37). Notably, it is the transposition of artistic values onto the human body that allows the latter to be viewed in a redemptive light. This notion that the visual arts facilitate redemption is closely tied to the idea that artistic study and practice serve to improve our sense of vision, a belief expressed not only in Blake’s texts but also in Cumberland’s Thoughts on Outline and Robson’s Grammigraphia. Blake’s remarks on Lavater’s Aphorisms make two contributions to the understanding of his thoughts on art, redemption and form. First, the

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very existence of such extensive annotations indicate a belief that textual bodies are themselves capable of initiating and engaging in dialogue. In not only heeding, but going beyond Lavater’s injunction to ‘interline such of these aphorisms as affected you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness’ (§643; E583), Blake responds to the text in a manner not all that different from the manner in which he might respond to Lavater himself. This sense that Blake sees himself as establishing a relationship with Lavater through the text is indicated not only by his enclosure of Lavater’s name and his own within a heart (E583), but also in his comments at the end of the text: ‘I write from the warmth of my heart. & cannot resist the impulse I feel to rectify what I think false in a book I love so much’ (p. 224; E600). This suggests not only that inspired productions can enable individuals to converse in spirit in spite of physical absence, but also that such conversation must take the form of an active and principled engagement with the other. Secondly, Blake’s comments speak to the importance of the penetrative gaze. The Christ is one who can perceive and interpret the divine essence or staminal virtues that drive growth and provide the substance of bodily and artistic form. The cry, ‘Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love!’ (Visions, 7.16; E50), is itself not enough. One must be able to appreciate the subtle relationship between the imperfections arising from accident and the divine energy emanating from essence: ‘For let it be rememberd that creation is. God descending according to the weakness of man’ (§630; E599). Blake’s adamant condemnation of ‘Sneerers’, ‘crawlers’ and ‘hypocrite[s]’ throughout his comments on Lavater (§59, 61, 292; E585, 590), and the vehemence with which he attacks philosophical opponents such as Locke, is offset by his sense that it is weakness that keeps identities from becoming identical. This distinction between divine essence and human identity is central to Blake’s ideas about incarnation: If the Essence was the same as the Identity there could be but one Identity. which is false Heaven would upon this plan be but a Clock[.] (Divine Love, §27; E604) It is the interplay between substance and accident, variety and unity, that allows for the expression of personal genius. ‘Improvement makes strait roads’, Blake tells us, ‘but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius’ (The Marriage, 10; E38). It is the lusts and appetites of the human body, which from an angelic or Urizenic perspective are


marks of frailty and imperfection, that give shape to human identity and facilitates both the interiorisation and the public expression of that light which is love, by inducing us to seek something beyond the ‘shadows of [our] curtains’ (Visions, 7.7; E50). Returning to Rushdie, we hear the God of Gibreel’s delusion inquiring of his unlikely archangel: Did we pluck you from the skies so that you could boff and spat with some (no doubt remarkable) flatfoot blonde? (p. 319) We can only imagine what Blake’s answer might be.

Notes Introduction: Blake and his traditions 1. William Blake, ‘Annotations to Aphorisms’, p. 226; E596. John Casper Lavater, Aphorisms on Man, trans. J.H. Fuseli (London: J. Johnson, 1788). I have consulted this edition, though not the copy owned by Blake. All citations of Lavater’s text will be referred to by aphorism number rather than page number. The same holds true for citations of Blake’s annotations of particular aphorisms when his remarks refer to a particular aphorism except in instances where Blake’s comments appear on a blank page and following Erdman, I will refer to these by page number. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Blake’s work are taken from David V. Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edn (London: Doubleday, 1988), hereafter ‘E’. 2. Edward Larrissy, William Blake (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 36. 3. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 8; John Beer, Blake’s Humanism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), p. 16; Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 136–8; Tristanne Connolly, William Blake and the Body (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 30–1, 42, 62. 4. S.H. Clark, ‘Blake’s Milton as Empiricist Epic: “Weaving the Woof of Locke” ’, SiR, 36 (1997), pp. 457–82; Steve Clark, ‘ “Labouring at the Resolute Anvil”: Blake’s Response to Locke’, in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 133–52; and Wayne Glausser, Locke and Blake: A Conversation Across the Eighteenth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 5. Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Desiree Hirst, Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964). 6. Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 7. Keri Davies, ‘William Blake’s Mother: A New Identification’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 33 (1999), pp. 36–50; Marsha Keith Schuchard and Keri Davies, ‘Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 38 (2004), pp. 36–43. 8. Steve Clark and David Worrall, eds, Blake in the Nineties (London: Macmillan, 1999); and Historicizing Blake (London: Macmillan, 1994). 9. Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 289. Although in the appendix to this text, Viscomi lists 1794 and 1795 as the first printing of No Natural Religion and All Religions respectively, he dates their composition to 1788 (pp. 187–97). 191

192 Notes 10. S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary, rev. edn (London: University Press of New England, 1988), p. 243. 11. David Worrall, ‘William Blake and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1975), pp. 397–417.

1 Experiences of empiricism 1. ‘Blake and the Mills of Induction’, Blake Newsletter: An Illustrated Quarterly, 10 (1977), pp. 109–12 (p. 111). 2. James Hindmarsh, A New Dictionary of Correspondences, Representation, &c. or the Spiritual Significations of Words, Sentences, &c. As Used in the Sacred Scriptures ([London]: Robert Hindmarsh, 1794), p. 239. 3. Jean H. Hagstrum, ‘William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment’, in Critical Essays on William Blake, ed. Hazard Adams (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991), pp. 67–78 (p. 69). 4. For Locke’s significance within a larger history of ideas, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 164–77; Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 125–7; Ian Hacking, ‘Memory Sciences, Memory Politics’, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 67–87 (pp. 80–1). 5. For the connection between Blake and Hume, I am indebted to White, who notes that both Blake and Hume were concerned ‘that the new logic [of empiricism], like the old, triumphed by means of circular reasoning’ (p. 110). 6. The authorship of the English ‘translation’ of Aphorisms is itself a matter of debate as the translator, Blake’s friend Fuseli, took certain creative liberties with the text. Blake may well have been aware of Fuseli’s inventiveness, though, as one who ‘cannot concieve the Divinity of the [. . .] Bible to consist either in who they were written by or at what time’ (Annotations to Watson, p. 22; E618), Blake is likely to have regarded this as of little consequence. In any case, Blake addresses Lavater by name throughout his annotations, and following his lead I too will refer to Lavater as the work’s author. For a detailed discussion of this matter, see Carol Louise Hall, Blake and Fuseli: A Study in the Transmission of Ideas (London and New York: Garland Publishing, 1985) and R.J. Shroyer’s introduction to the Scholar’s facsimile of Blake’s copy of Aphorisms (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1980). 7. Erdman links these comments with Johnson’s imprisonment as part of his larger argument concerning Blake’s fears about persecution for publication (Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; repr. London: Dover, 1991), pp. 301–2). While Erdman’s suggestion that the withdrawal of The French Revolution entailed the ‘withdrawal from any audience beyond a few uncritical or even uncomprehending friends’ has been challenged by subsequent scholars, the suggestion that he was deeply affected by the persecutions of the 1790s seems undeniable (Prophet, p. 153). For recent re-evaluations of Blake’s potential audience, see David Worrall, ‘Blake and 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture’, in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 194–211. 8. The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 72.

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9. The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 41. 10. Peter Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 4–19. 11. These topics have been discussed at length by Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 152–3; Robert N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 189–94; Edward Larrissy, ‘Spectral Imposition and Visionary Imposition: Printing and Repetition in Blake’, in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 61–77 (pp. 63–4, 68–9); Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea, pp. 42–4. 12. Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 5. 13. For a detailed discussion of these issues, together with evidence of late eighteenth-century criticisms of Locke see Ferber, pp. 14–24. 14. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 136. 15. Much has already been written on Blake’s concept of the spectre, and the following studies provide detailed discussions of the topic: Steve Vine, Blake’s Poetry: Spectral Visions (London: Macmillan, 1993); Lorraine Clark, Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: California University Press, 1983), pp. 147–72. To my knowledge, little has been written to date comparing Blake’s spectre with that encountered in Specters of Marx, but see Colebrook below. 16. Claire Colebrook provides an informative and useful discussion of Blake, Derrida and the (Derridean) spectre, which discusses the conjuration and counter-conjuration characteristic of enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought (‘The New Jerusalem and the New International’, Parallax, 7 (2001), pp. 17–28). Colebrook’s discussion differs in focus from the one presented here, though her readings converge with mine in a number of significant ways, as noted below. 17. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, repr. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253–64 (p. 256). 18. G.E. Bentley Jr., Blake Books (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 692. 19. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), §2.1.3–4. 20. Thomas R. Frosch, The Awakening of Albion: The Renovation of the Body in the Poetry of William Blake (London: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 26–7, 31. 21. Joseph Viscomi, ‘In the Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Printmaking in Blake’s Marriage’, in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 27–60 (p. 44). 22. As instructed by aphorism 643, Blake has underlined the aphorisms that have ‘affected [him] agreeably, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness’ (E583). Following Erdman, Blake’s underlining here, and throughout the marginalia, is indicated by the use of italics.

194 Notes 23. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996), 3.P53.Dem. References to this text are to book number, proposition or definition number and either demonstration, corollary, scholium, or explanation. 24. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988), p. 18. 25. Mary Lynn Johnson, ‘Blake, Democritus, and the “Fluxions of the Atom”: Some Contexts for Materialist Critiques’, in Historicizing Blake, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 105–24. 26. Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 8–9. 27. See also: Peter A. Schock, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Blake’s Myth of Satan and its Cultural Matrix’, ELH, 60 (1993), pp. 441–70 (pp. 443, 457–8); John Beer, ‘Influence and Independence in Blake’, in Interpreting Blake, ed. Michael Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 196–261 (p. 223). 28. For a detailed discussion of the difficulties in linking Priestley with Inflammable Gas, see Erdman, Prophet, p. 93n. 29. Rodney M. Baine and Mary R. Baine, ‘Blake’s Inflammable Gas’, Blake Newsletter, 10 (1976), pp. 51–2 (p. 51); William Nicholson, An Introduction to Natural Philosophy, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1787), I, pp. 13–17. 30. Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (London: J. Johnson, 1777), p. 49. 31. A History of the Corruptions of Christianity (London: British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 1871), p. 4. 32. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1751] 1991), p. 309; see also Priestley, Corruptions, p. 54. 33. Glausser remarks that Blake ‘can embrace Paine’s politics more easily than his religion’ (p. 8). Similarly, Worrall notes that whereas Visions demonstrates Painite ideals of liberalism and anti-colonialism, texts such as Urizen, All Religions and No Natural Religion demonstrate a disillusionment with Paine (David Worrall, ‘Alternative Europes: Blake and London Print Subcultures’, Blake, Nation and Empire (Tate Gallery Conference, 8–9 December 2000)).

2 The tree of mystery 1. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton, rev. edn (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 2.3, pp. 58–9. 2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968; repr. 1987), p. 171; John C. Whale, ‘Literal and Symbolic Representations: Burke, Paine and the French Revolution’, History of European Ideas, 16 (1993), pp. 343–9. 3. Fairbanks suggests, during his apprenticeship to Basire, Blake would have encountered a testament to Burke’s aristocratic lineage in the form of the monument to the ‘Countess Dowager of Clanrickard’, the inscription on which ‘identifies [her] as the wife of “MICHAELL, [. . .] the Head of the Antient and Noble Family of the BURKES” ’ (A. Harris Fairbanks, ‘Blake,

Notes

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

195

Burke, and the Clanrickard Monument’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 31 (1997), pp. 76–81 (p. 76)). Susanna Jordan, ‘Burke’s Pain: The Authority of the Invisible in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry’, Romanticism and Empirical Method (Conference Paper, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2–3 March 2001), March 3. Emanuel Swedenborg, The Wisdom of Angels, Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, trans. [N. Tucker] (London: W. Chalklen, 1788). I have consulted Blake’s copy of this text. References are to section numbers, not pages, for this text as well as for Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, Divine Providence, and Conjugal Love. Cf. Colebrook, pp. 20–1, 25–6. Thompson links Volney directly to The Marriage, plate 11, suggesting that Blake could have come across extracts in Johnson’s Analytical Review, published in January 1792 (p. 201); however, given Viscomi’s re-dating of the text to 1790 (Blake and the Idea, pp. 235–40), Blake’s text precedes the English translations of Ruins. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (New York: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 181; Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Nelson F. Adkins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 4. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. T.J.B. Spencer (London: Penguin, 1980), 1.3.78–80. Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, ed. Joseph Priestley, 2nd edn (London: J. Johnson, 1790). All references to Hartley refer to this edition. Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 3 vols (London: [n. pub.], 1744; repr. J. Johnson, 1791). For an informative discussion of Cowper and Blake, together with reproductions of the engravings from Cowper’s text, see Connolly, pp. 46–58. Harald A. Kittel, ‘The Book of Urizen and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, in Interpreting Blake, ed. Michael Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 111–44 (p. 120). David Worrall, ‘Introduction: Blake’s Urizen Books’, in William Blake: The Urizen Books (Italy: Princeton University Press/William Blake Trust, 1995), pp. 10, 12. Such effects are, to be sure, anathemas to the democratic spirit of Priestley’s work and Locke’s. However, the ease with which combinations of religious humility and theories of moral education could be co-opted by conservative forces is aptly attested to by the preponderance of anti-levelling tracts published throughout the 1790s. A prime example of such pamphlets, as Erdman notes (Prophet, p. 274), is William Vincent’s A Discourse, Addressed to the People of Great-Britain (London: [Hookham and Carpenter], 1792). Vincent, the Dean of Westminster, seeks to justify the existence of an impoverished class and promotes education as a form of charity that will teach the poor ‘their duty’ and thereby allow the wealthy to secure both their earthly possessions and their spiritual rewards. Through education, the poor will be deterred from vice and ‘robbery might be removed from our streets, and plunder from our houses’, whilst the robbers and thieves will have their soul’s saved, certainly ‘the most acceptable service you can render to God’ (p. 17).

196 Notes

3 Right reason and ‘Sense Supernaturall’ 1. Lodowick Muggleton, A True Interpretation of all the Chief Texts [. . .] of the Revelation of St. John (London: the author, 1665; repr. [London(?)]: [n. pub.], 1746), p. v. 2. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 463. 3. ‘Signatura Rerum’, in The Works of Jacob Behmen, The Teutonic Theosopher, ed. G. Ward and T. Langcake, trans. J. Sparrow, J. Ellistone, and H. Blunden 4 vols (London: M. Richardson, 1764–81); all quotations from Boehme’s works come from this edition, unless otherwise stated. In addition to consulting this addition, I have also made use of Jacob Boehme, The Signature of all Things; of the Supersensual Life; of Heaven and Hell; Discourse Between Two Souls (London: M. Richardson, 1764–81; repr. [London]: Kessinger, 2004), which reprints volumes from the Ward and Langcake edition. The pagination between these collections is consistent. 4. Bryan Aubrey, Watchmen of Eternity: Blake’s Debt to Jacob Boehme (London: University Press of America, 1986), pp. 51–2. 5. Marsha Keith Schuchard, ‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried: Swedenborg, Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision’, Esoterica, 2 (2000), , pp. 45–93 (p. 47). For connections between Blake’s family and the Moravians, see Keri Davies ‘William Blake’s Mother: A New Identification’ and also Marsha Keith Schuchard and Keri Davies, ‘Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family’. 6. Laurence Clarkson, ‘A Single Eye’, in A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Junction, 1983), pp. 161–75 (p. 162, ll. 17–19). All quotations from Clarkson, Coppe and Salmon are from this edition. 7. Albiezer Coppe, ‘Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spiritual Wine’, A Collection of Ranter Writings, pp. 42–72 (p. 60); Joseph Salmon, ‘Heights in Depths and Depths in Heights’, A Collection of Ranter Writings, pp. 203–23 (p. 219). 8. ’A Rout, A Rout’, in A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Junction, 1983), pp. 189–200 (p. 195). 9. ’A Fiery Flying Roll’, A Collection of Ranter Writings, pp. 80–97 (p. 87). 10. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 93. 11. The Gift, translators note, p. 96. 12. The Two Bookes of Sr Francis Bacon, of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (Oxford: Thomas Huggins, 1633), pp. 10–11. 13. ’The Reasonableness of Christianity’, The Works of John Locke, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London: Arthur Bettesworth et al., 1727), pp. 473–541 (pp. 508–9). 14. Lodowick Muggleton, The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit (London: [n. pub.], 1699), pp. 25, 39. 15. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass: Or the Third and Last Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 3rd edn (London: [n. pub.], 1656; [London(?)]: [n. pub.], repr. 1719), p. 4. 16. Thompson, p. 65; Barry Reay, ‘The Muggletonians: An Introductory Survey’, in The World of the Muggletonians, ed. Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont (London: Temple Smith, 1983), pp. 23–63 (p. 29).

Notes

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17. Edward Taylor, Jacob Behmen’s Theosophik Philosophy Unfolded, ed. and abr. Edward Taylor (London: Tho[mas] Salusbury, 1691), p. 1. This edition was brought to my attention by Hirst’s discussion in Hidden Riches, p. 91. 18. Viscomi argues that the order of plate production was as follows: 21–4, 12–13, 1–3, 5–6, 11, 6–10, 14, 15, 16–20, 25–7; Joseph Viscomi, ‘The Evolution of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58 (1997), pp. 281–344 (p. 324). Viscomi is unable to provide a definite position for plate 4 within this series, although he suggests that it appears to be associated with plates 14 and 15 (ibid., p. 333). 19. Robert F. Gleckner, ‘Priestley and the Chameleon Angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 13 (1979), pp. 37–9. Priestley’s description is from The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours. By reversing the order of the colourchanges, Gleckner argues, Blake is suggesting the Angel’s movement from ‘malleability’ to ‘steely self-righteousness’ (p. 38).

4 The opening eye 1. Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies & Times, 2 vols (London: [n. pub.], 1794), I, p. 45. 2. An Account of the Doctrine, Manners, Liturgy, and Idiom of the Unitas Fratrum (London: [n. pub.], 1749), p. 22. 3. See, for example, Corruptions, p. 2, where Priestley blames the doctrine of Christ as Logos on the impact of Platonism: ‘That very system, indeed, which made Christ to have been the eternal reason, or Logos or the Father, did not, probably, exist in the time of the apostle John, but was introduced from the principles of Platonism afterwards’. Though Priestley seeks to reject the doctrine of Christ’s divinity, prized so highly by the Moravians and others, his insistence on his humanity, his being made flesh and resurrected from the dead, stems from a similar impulse for the removal of priestly and political mystery even though his work perpetuates belief in the inaccessibility of an invisible deity. 4. The New-Jerusalem Magazine, 6 vols (London: the Society, 1790), I, p. 77. 5. Marsha Keith Schuchard and Keri Davies, ‘Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family: Part II’ (unpublished article, 2004), §55. This unpublished paper (hereafter referred to as Schuchard and Davies II) represents the second half of a two part piece, the first of which was published in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 38 (2004) and is cited above. As the paper is in electronic form, I have opted to refer to paragraph numbers rather than page numbers; these begin at paragraph 25. 6. Schuchard and Davies are here drawing upon Craig Atwood, ‘Blood, Sex, and Death: Life and Liturgy in Zinzendorf’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1995), which unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to consult. 7. Emanuel Swedenborg, A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell, trans. [William Cookworth and Thomas Hartley], 2nd edn (London: R. Hindmarsh, 1784), §78. This is the edition annotated by Blake, although I have not had the opportunity to consult Blake’s copy.

198 Notes 8. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 1327. 9. The Delights of Wisdom Respecting Conjugal Love. After Which Follow The Pleasures of Insanity Respecting Scortatory Love [n. trans.] (London: London Universal Society for Promotion of the New Church, 1790), §27. This edition was published in serial form attached to each issue of The New Jerusalem Magazine. 10. Marsha Keith Schuchard, ‘The Secret Masonic History of Blake’s Swedenborg Society’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 26 (1992), pp. 40–51 (p. 45). 11. Schuchard provides detailed accounts of the political allegiances and conflicts amongst London Swedenborgians, situating these within the historical context of late eighteenth-century Europe; see ‘Blake and the Grand Masters (1791–4): Architects of Repression or Revolution?’, in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 173–93; ‘The Secret Masonic History’ and ‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’. 12. Emanuel, Swedenborg, The Wisdom of Angels Concerning the Divine Providence, trans. [N. Tucker] (London: Hindmarsh [1790]), p. xviii; E609. I have consulted the edition owned by Blake, though I have not been able to access his copy. Bentley lists 1790 as the probable date of Blake’s annotation (Blake Books, p. 697). 13. See the discussion in Chapter 5 below, which discusses in detail Blake’s association of the understanding with God and experience, and of love with the affections and the divine influx. 14. Gholam Reza Sabri-Tabrizi, The ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ of William Blake (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), pp. 1–24; for the political affiliations of different Masonic lodges, see Schuchard, ‘Blake and the Grand Masters’, pp. 174–6. 15. The lack of a section number for this citation is due to the fact that this sentence is not part of the main body of text, but rather a heading that summarises the argument developed in sections 163–6. 16. The passage from Swedenborg reads: With Respect to God, it is not possible that he can love and be reciprocally beloved by others, in whom there is any Thing infinite [. . .]; for if there was any Thing infinite, [. . .] then it would not be beloved by others, but it would love itself; for Infinite or the Divine is one; if this existed in others, it would be itself, and it would be essential Self Love, whereof not the least is possible in God; for this is totally opposite to the Divine Essence; wherefore it must exist in others, in whom there is nothing of the self-existent Divine: That it exists in the Beings created from the Divine will be seen below. The difference between creatures being divine and being ‘created from the Divine’ is all important as the latter opinion, with which Blake takes issue, is based upon the assumption that the creation is in itself dead. 17. Notably, the potential for a rapid engagement with topical issues during the early 1790s seems to have been one of the benefits of the method of illuminated printing in general, prior to Blake’s more expensive and timeconsuming experiments in colour-printing; see Worrall, ‘Blake and 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture’, p. 195.

Notes

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18. See Priestley’s edition of Hartley pp. ix–xi, xvii, xxi, and xxvii; and my discussion above in Chapter 2. 19. For more on the shared significance of the figure or image in relation to thoughts on futurity, thought and experience in both Blake and Derrida, see Colebrook, pp. 23, 25–6. 20. The Illuminated Blake: William Blake’s Complete Illuminated Works with a Plateby-Plate Commentary (London: Dover, 1992), p. 102. 21. Joseph Priestley, The Present State of Europe Compared with the Antient Prophecies (London: J. Johnson, 1794), p. 2. 22. Jon Mee, ‘Is There an Antinomian in the House? William Blake and the After-Life of a Heresy’, in Historicizing Blake, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 43–58 (p. 48).

5 The ark of God 1. The liminal status of this work can be extended beyond the level of content and can be applied to its position with Blake’s corpus as a whole. Produced in 1793, For Children incorporates sketches from Blake’s notebook as well as illustrations used in other works produced during the 1780s and ’90s, including, The Marriage, the Book of Urizen and the Book of Los as well as illustrations to Blair’s Grave and to Milton’s Paradise Lost. The continued importance of the series is indicated by Blake’s revision and reissue of the work, as For The Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, c. 1820 (Viscomi, Blake and the Idea, p. 264). While I have included references to the facsimiles and transcriptions in Erdman’s Complete Works, the numbering of plates from For Children follows that used on the Blake Archive, which is from Bentley. 2. Frank M. Parisi, ‘Emblems of Melancholy: For Children: The Gates of Paradise’, in Interpreting Blake, ed. Michael Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 70–110 (p. 75). 3. Erdman suggests the sibylline connection in his examination of the sketch of this emblem found in Blake’s notebook (David V. Erdman and D.K. Moore, The Notebook of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 21). 4. Worrall, who notes the connection between Eno and the figure on For Children plate 18, suggests that Eno occupies ‘a transitional phase between primitive female bard and early priest’ and thus ‘is historically poised between true vision and the corruption of organized religion’ (‘The Book of Los: The Designs’, in William Blake: The Urizen Books (Italy: Princeton University Press/William Blake Trust, 1995), p. 202). 5. Robert Lowth, Isaiah: A New Translation, 2nd edn (London: J. Dodsley and T. Cadell, 1779). 6. Viscomi notes that The Marriage was ‘restructured’ in copy G (printed in 1818), ‘with the “memorable fancies” of plates 15 and 12–13 reversed, creating the sequence of plates 1–10, 11, 15, 14, 12–13, 16–27’ (Blake and the Idea, p. 331); however, the plate order in earlier copies seems to have been consistent and when Blake printed The Marriage again in 1827 (copy I) it ‘reverted to its original order’ (ibid.).

200 Notes 7. Frye, for instance, argues: Oothoon has ‘plucked the flower’ of imaginative experience and has entered the state of innocence. She cannot argue or rationalize, but she has passed through sense to imagination and can no longer be persuaded against her own direct knowledge that the world is one of uniform law. [. . .]. She has learned that this life is a transfiguration of the sexual life of the natural world, and has nothing to do with the refined fantasies of spiritual eunuchs. But once this more abundant life gets loose in the natural world, it will destroy the present form of that world if it is not smothered, and another thing that Oothoon has learned is that there are plenty of people waiting to smother it. (pp. 239–40) Ostriker provides a more optimistic reading of the text and an even more celebratory characterisation of its heroine. Describing Oothoon as ‘a heroine unequalled in English poetry before or since’, she writes: Oothoon not only defines and defends her own sexuality [. . .] and not only attacks patriarchal ideology root and branch, but outflanks everyone in her poem for intellectuality and spirituality, and is intellectual and spiritual precisely because she is erotic. (Alicia Ostriker, ‘Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality’, in Critical Essays on William Blake, ed. Hazard Adams (Boston, MA: Hall, 1991), pp. 90–110 (p. 94))

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

Bruder similarly emphasises Oothoon’s sensuality, rejecting ‘the idea that she should be the passive object of male desire and instead claims the right to be the subject of her own libidinous inclination’ (Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 74). Bruder notes that these ‘activities in Leutha’s vale have drawn a good deal of critical comment, with some writers arguing that it is a realm of sexual evasiveness and denial [. . .], whilst others, though prepared to admit that she finds her sexuality here, argue that all Oothoon wants to do is give it away, as a gift to give pleasure to a man’ (p. 75). In contrast, Bruder presents a convincing argument that Oothoon is embracing her own potential for sexual pleasure and, indeed, auto-eroticism (ibid.). The points of uncertainty are marked by Erdman’s typography, which I have omitted above for ease of reading. Erdman’s original rendering of the problematic lines reads as follows, with the bracketed material representing conjecture: ‘Man could ?never [have received] ?light from heaven ?without [aid of the] affections’ (E602). Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 171–2. See Worrall, ‘William Blake and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden’. For two informative discussions of The Fertilization, see Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, pp. 158–9; and, Beer, ‘Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth: Some Cross-Currents and Parallels, 1789–1805’, in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 231–59 (pp. 246–53).

Notes

201

13. Darwin’s essay on the Portland Vase forms part of the ‘Additional Notes’ appended to the Economy of Vegetation, which were paginated separately. A similar set of notes were also appended to The Loves of the Plants, though there the pagination is continuous. All references are from the Scholar Press reprint of Johnson’s 1791 edition (Menston: 1973), though I have also consulted the Woodstock Books facsimile of the 1789 edition of Loves (New York: 1991). 14. Although Botanic Garden was not published until 1791, this passage can also be found in proem of The Loves of the Plants (London: J. Johnson, 1789; repr. New York: Woodstock Books, 1991), p. v. 15. Indeed, the Moravians were subject to criticism from outside sources, seeking to foster hostility towards the group by means of publicising their allegedly immoral acts; see Schuchard, ‘Why Mrs. Blake Cried’, p. 49. 16. Cf. Politics, p. 65: ‘Love’ wants to possess. It wants the possessing. It is the possessing – cupidity itself (Habsucht); it always hopes for new property; and even the very Christian ‘love of one’s neighbour’ – charity, perhaps – would reveal only a new lust in this fundamental drive. 17. The passage in question reads: Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poets Song Record the journey of immortal Milton thro’ your Realms [. . .] Come into my hand By your mild power; descending down the Nerves of my right arm From out the Portals of my Brain [. . .]. (Milton, 2.1–7; E96) Essick associates the ‘Poets Song’ with dictation and hearing, noting the movement from this oral/aural communication into the ‘ “hand” of the writer-etcher’ (Blake and Language, p. 183). 18. Both the letters in question are from 1803, numbers 27 and 28 in Erdman’s edition. The relevant lines read: I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will. (E728–9) I hope [. . .] to speak to future generations by a Sublime Allegory which is now perfectly completed into a Grand Poem[.] I may praise it since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary the Authors are in Eternity[.] (E730) 19. While Viscomi notes that All Religions was composed in 1788, the only extant copy that was printed by Blake and to which he assigns a date is copy A, printed in 1795. The Marriage, on the other hand, was reprinted on numerous occasions with copy D printed in 1795 (Blake and the Idea, pp. 187, 376–9).

202 Notes 20. Some Thoughts Concerning Education: A New Edition (London: J. & R. Tonson, 1779). Concerning Education was first published in 1690 and was reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. I have selected the 1779 edition primarily for its historical proximity to Blake. 21. I am thinking here primarily of the Innocence poem, whose power and insight resides in its sense of the subtle workings of a concept that, retroactively, can be identified as ideology. One of the most comprehensive and informative discussions of the poem in this context remains Larrissy’s discussion of the poem in William Blake. 22. John Casper Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. Henry Hunter, Vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1789), p. 20. This work consists of three volumes with a complicated production history and multiple title pages, each with differing publication details (Bentley, Blake Books, pp. 593–5). All of Blake’s engravings, or at least all which have been signed by him, occur in Volume 1 (ibid., p. 594). This is the only volume that I have cited and my reference follows the publication details given on its title page. The edition I have used corresponds to ‘A’ in Bentley and is housed in the British Library. 23. George Cumberland, Thoughts on Outline, Sculpture, and the System that Guided the Ancient Artists in Composing Their Figures and Groupes (London: Robinson, 1796), pp. 47–8. 24. In a letter dated 23 December 1796, Blake writes: I have lately had some pricks of conscience on account of not acknowledging your friendship to me [before] immediately on the reciet of your. beautiful book. [. . .]. Go on Go on. such works as yours Nature & Providence the Eternal Parents demand from their children how few produce them in such perfection[.] (E700) The depth and longevity of Blake’s friendship with Cumberland is further attested by a recently discovered letter from Blake to Cumberland, posted in September 1800, which begins, ‘To have obtained your friendship is better than to have sold ten thousand books’ (Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley, ‘ “Dear Generous Cumberland”: A Newly Discovered Letter and Poem by William Blake’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 32 (1998), pp. 4–13 (p. 4)). The letter contains the first extant references in writing to Blake’s upcoming move to Felpham, but a large portion of it is devoted to Cumberland’s projects (ibid., pp. 5, 10). Of particular significance to the idea of outline is the proposal for a national gallery to house plaster replicas of antique statues, which Blake mentions in this letter. Blake discusses this proposal in other letters to Cumberland (cf. the letter of 2 July 1800; E706) and in the letter to the Monthly Magazine, which he attaches to the newly discovered letter. In the latter, Blake describes the use of such a gallery as ‘To Correct & Determine Public Taste as well as to be Treasures of Study for Artists’ (‘A Newly Discovered Letter’, p. 4). While the bearing this has on the idea of outline may seem unclear, Cumberland himself maintains that ‘statue is all Outline’ (Outline, p. 9) and thus the study of sculpture includes within it the study of outline. Indeed, while ‘a fine simple Outline may possess grace,

Notes

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action, expression, character, and proportion’, a statue is better ‘as it contains all these qualities when varied a thousand ways; but, at the same time, we must acknowledge, that it costs infinitely more study and labour’ (ibid., p. 33). The establishment of a national gallery of plaster casts, therefore, would provide an opportunity to study outline as embodied in the sculptures of great artists. 25. William Robson, Grammigraphia; Or the Grammar of Drawing (London: the author, 1794), p. 147. 26. Compare, for example, the description of ‘Love’ as ‘the human form divine’ in ‘The Divine Image’ from Innocence (l.11; E13) and ‘the Human Form Divine’ as ‘Terror’ concealed by the ‘Secrecy’ of ‘the Human Dress’ in the Experience poem (‘A Divine Image’, ll. 3–4; E32). 27. The term is Cumberland’s; cf. Outline, p. 44: ladies, who have walked without harm with gentlemen through every Museum in Europe, and beheld all that Grecian Art, even when it was playful, could shew, teach their countrywomen [. . .] to examine [. . .] the antique statues.

6 The Sublime Act 1. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 318. 2. Percival Proctor and William Catieau, The Modern Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 4 vols (London: the authors, 1774), IV. 3. In addition to Boehme’s texts themselves, Blake would have encountered Boehme’s idea of speech as an affective embodiment of thought through the medium of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, which Blake annotated in the same year as Aphorisms (Bentley, Blake Books, pp. 695–6). Unlike Boehme and Blake, however, Swedenborg does not attribute this affective power to human speech, but only to the speech of angels (cf. Heaven and Hell, §234–44). 4. See Edward Larrissy, ‘Postmodern Romanticisms’, NASSR ’99 (Conference Paper, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada, 12–15 August 1999), August 14; and Edward Larrissy, ‘When Was Blake?’ (Inaugural Lecture, University of Leeds, 31 January 2001). 5. There have been many excellent studies in this area. Three of the most recent, produced in the past eight years, are Williams’ Ideology and Utopia, Makisi’s Romantic Imperialism, and Bruder’s Blake and the Daughters of Albion.

Bibliography An Account of the Doctrine, Manners, Liturgy, and Idiom of the Unitas Fratrum (London: [n. pub.], 1749). Atwood, Craig, ‘Blood, Sex, and Death: Life and Liturgy in Zinzendorf’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1995). Aubrey, Bryan, Watchmen of Eternity: Blake’s Debt to Jacob Boehme (London: University Press of America, 1986). Bacon, Francis, The Two Bookes of Sr Francis Bacon, of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (Oxford: Thomas Huggins, 1633). Baine, Rodney M. and Mary R. Baine, ‘Blake’s Inflammable Gas’, Blake Newsletter, 10 (1976), pp. 51–2. Beer, John, Blake’s Humanism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968). ——, ‘Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth: Some Cross-Currents and Parallels, 1789–1805’, in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 231–59. ——, ‘Influence and Independence in Blake’, in Interpreting Blake, ed. Michael Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 196–261. Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, repr. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253–64. Bentley, G.E. Jr., Blake Books (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). ——, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (London: Yale University Press, 2001). Berkeley, George, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I (Dublin: Jeremy Pepyat, 1710). The Bible, King James Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, [n.d.]). [Boehme, Jacob], Jacob Behmen’s Theosophik Philosophy Unfolded, ed. and abr. Edward Taylor (London: Thomas Salusbury, 1691). ——, The Works of Jacob Behmen, The Teutonic Theosopher, ed. G. Ward and T. Langcake [trans. J. Sparrow, J. Ellistone, and H. Blunden] 4 vols (London: M. Richardson, 1764–81). ——, The Signature of all Things; of the Supersensual Life; of Heaven and Hell; Discourse Between Two Souls (London: M. Richardson, 1764–81; repr. [London]: Kessinger, 2004). Brothers, Richard, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies & Times, 2 vols (London: [n. pub.], 1794). Bruder, Helen P., William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (London: Macmillan, 1997). Bryant, Jacob, A Mythological, Etymological, and Historical Dictionary; Extracted from the Analysis of Ancient Mythology, ed. William Holwell (London: C. Dilly, 1793). Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968; repr. 1987). ——, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton, rev. edn (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 204

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Index

abstraction, 46–50, 53, 55, 57, 60, 64–5, 69, 80, 84, 91, 95, 109, 115, 118, 122, 132, 138–9, 144, 151–2, 162, 164, 169, 171, 180, 182–3 abyss, 53, 72–3, 76, 78, 94, 99, 116–17, 143 abyssal eye, 72–3, 91, 130 accident, 1, 18, 88, 104, 172–4, 177, 180, 181, 185, 187, 189 action, 32, 33, 37, 47, 83, 122–3, 130, 170, 175–6 creative, 48, 92, 155, 170, 183, 186 divine/spiritual, 46, 69, 79, 87, 92, 122, 133, 142, 176, 183 intellectual/mental, 15, 21, 22, 27–8, 46, 57, 67, 68, 88, 101, 112, 147, 157–8, 163, 165, 180, 188 of love, 103–4, 121–3, 180 redeemed/redemptive, 12, 75–7, 86, 102, 107, 142, 156, 177, 188–9 sensory/perceptive, 23, 62, 85, 88, 92, 143, 155, 165 sexual, 125, 132, 143, 153, 200, 201 virtuous, 1, 174–5 Adam Kadmon, 73 see also divine humanity; God as a man aesthetics, 10, 22, 44, 140, 169, 182 aetiology, 33, 47, 49, 68, 72 affection/mental affect, 32, 34, 57–9, 120–3, 125, 145–7, 149, 154, 162, 165, 176, 180–1, 189, 193, 198, 200, 203 see also divine love Ahania, 64 Ahania, The Book of, 33, 42–3, 63–6, 165 alchemy, 93–5, 108 All Religions are One, 7, 10, 11, 13–14, 34, 47–8, 68–9, 71, 88, 92, 97–8, 120, 137–9, 159, 167, 171–2, 176, 181, 191, 194, 201

alterity, 17–18, 45, 48, 50, 67, 74, 78, 83–4, 91, 116, 126, 130, 141, 152, 154–6, 163–4, 173, 177, 182, 184 see also other America: a Prophecy, 19, 24, 129, 137 angels, 33, 48, 52, 79–82, 95, 97, 99, 100, 105–7, 109–10, 112–21, 125–7, 176, 183–4, 189–90, 203 Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by R. Watson, 11, 47, 147, 179, 188, 192 to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, 1, 9, 15, 33, 56, 116, 121, 131–3, 142, 144, 159, 166–81, 185–9, 191 to Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, 50, 106, 108–26, 145–6, 158, 161, 166, 180, 185, 188–9 to Swedenborg’s Divine Providence, 106, 108–26 to Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, 106, 108–26, 203 to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2, 4, 10, 23, 26 anti-Semitism, 72, 179 antijacobinism, 16, 178 antinomianism, 1, 5, 72, 75, 82, 99, 102, 129 apocalypse, 11–13, 32, 36, 105, 125, 127 appearance, 15, 29, 31–2, 67–8, 74, 78, 83, 87, 101, 120, 121, 125, 141, 165 Aristotle, 16, 95, 103–4, 118, 132 Ark of the Covenant, 131–3, 147, 164 Armitage, Catherine, 101–2, 108, 132 Armitage, Thomas, 101–4, 121 210

Index 211 art production of, 4, 7, 10–11, 18, 23, 76, 120, 138–9, 154–7, 168–9, 187 public reception of, 168–9 and redemption, 4, 9, 104, 139, 156, 169, 173, 186, 188–9 association, doctrine of, 56–61, 65 atonement, 38, 42, 146 attraction and repulsion, 53–6, 69, 72, 95 Atwood, Craig, 197 Aubrey, Bryan, 74–5, 93–5, 196 Bacon, Francis, 1, 6, 8, 10–14, 19, 23, 26, 61, 83–4, 196 Baine, Rodney M. and Mary R. Baine, 35, 194 Basire, James, 194 beauty, 77, 168, 172 see also sublime, the Beer, John, 3, 191, 194, 200 Behmenism, 75–7, 93–9, 101, 109–10, 174–5 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 193 Bentley, G.E. Jr., 23, 71, 167, 193, 198, 199, 202, 203 Berkeley, George, 14, 89, 105 Bible, The, 4, 16, 36–8, 71, 75, 79, 89, 118, 128, 192 Blake, Catherine (née Boucher), 109 Blake, William, see individual works blood theology, 101, 129, 138 body divine/spiritual, 3, 89–91, 95–104, 107–8, 129, 132–3, 178, 182, 188 history of, 31, 61, 71 human, 2, 13–14, 31–6, 38, 47, 53–4, 58, 60, 68, 72–6, 92, 96–104, 108, 112–14, 122–3, 132–3, 135–6, 145–6, 153–4, 160–2, 165–7, 173, 175, 188, 189 physical, 30, 31, 67, 71, 74, 161, 167 representations of, 3–4, 31, 58, 60–8, 71, 96, 100–2, 107, 118, 129, 160–1 see also dualism (mind–body)

Boehme, Jacob, 3–4, 6, 73–5, 77, 80, 91–9, 106, 109–10, 129, 173, 175–6, 185, 196, 197, 203 bounding line, 18, 153–62, 167, 168, 170, 180 brain, 42–3, 57–8, 63–4, 123, 143, 161 Brothers, Richard, 4, 5, 20, 88, 100, 126–30, 186, 197 Bruder, Helen P., 200, 203 Burke, Edmund, 22–3, 44–5, 59–60, 78, 129, 194–5 cause and effect, 1, 21, 29–30, 39, 43, 50–7, 60, 67, 98, 121, 166–7, 181 caverned man, 26–33, 116, 160–2, 179 see also self Christ, 3, 37–9, 76, 87, 92, 102–3, 121, 146, 164–5, 173, 178–9, 197 Christianity, 4, 35–9, 80, 132–3, 162, 171, 179, 201 Christology, 3, 38, 89–90, 100–5, 118, 132, 147 Church, 116–18, 145 Church doctrine, 38, 42 Church of England, 39, 81 New Jerusalem Church, 108–10, 113, 115 Roman Catholic, 39 Civil War (English), 75, 81 clarity, 4, 45, 128, 156, 162, 168, 185 Clark, Lorraine, 193 Clark, Steve, 4, 5, 6, 13, 20–3, 27, 45, 191, 192, 193 Clarkson, Laurence, 75–8, 80, 196 Colebrook, Claire, 32, 33, 73–4, 100, 193, 195, 199 comportment of embrace/engagement, 18, 118, 124–5, 141, 152, 156, 177, 181–2 of withdrawal, 24–5, 31, 46, 111, 114–15, 141, 150, 163 conception and execution, 155–9, 163, 170 Connolly, Tristanne, 3, 60, 104, 191, 195 conscience, 11, 47–9, 60, 71, 76, 90, 137, 146, 162

212 Index contraries, 13, 54, 69, 93, 95–6, 110, 119–20, 125, 174–6, 185 Coppe, Albiezer, 76–80, 127, 196 corporeality, see embodiment cosmogony, 13, 72, 93 counter-enlightenment, 4, 5, 9, 82–3, 99 see also Enlightenment, the; post-enlightenment crucifixion, 38, 42, 65–6, 103, 146–7, 178–9 see also mysterium tremendum; passion (suffering) Cumberland, George, 8, 9, 156, 159, 167–9, 188, 202, 203 Damon, S. Foster, 35, 136, 192 Darwin, Erasmus, 3, 6, 8, 148–52, 184, 201 Davies, Keri, 5, 81–2, 101–4, 115, 191, 196, 197 Deleuze, Gilles, 34, 47, 164, 165, 194 demonic, the, 77, 80–1, 91, 100 see also enthusiasm; orgiastic, the demonstration, 38, 46–8, 50, 76, 80, 86–7, 91, 105, 107, 116–19, 129 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 17, 20–2, 48, 49–50, 67, 72–81, 100–1, 103–4, 112, 121–2, 123, 125, 130, 154, 162–4, 179, 193, 199 Descartes, René, 2, 31 desire, 28, 37, 51–2, 62–8, 84, 91–2, 98, 102, 116, 118, 122–5, 129, 132–4, 138, 140, 143–5, 154, 158, 159, 165, 170, 171, 177, 179–80, 182–3, 185, 188, 200 see also energy determinism, 59–60, 161 devils, 16, 33, 35, 71, 79–81, 90–1, 95, 100, 105, 107, 109, 110, 114, 125–6, 138–9, 183–4 disembodiment, 43, 56, 91, 101, 132 see also embodiment divine humanity, 106–7 see also Adam Kadmon; God, as a man divine immanence, 36, 77, 94, 96, 103, 133, 171, 175, 182–3 divine love, 121, 132, 163, 175 see also desire

division, 14, 24, 29, 31, 50, 52, 62–3, 77, 97, 115, 132, 150, 157 dualism (mind–body), 5, 34, 54–5, 58, 60, 74, 95–6, 98, 101, 112–13, 123, 129, 136, 146, 150, 161–2, 167 Eaves, Morris, 193 economy of justice/sacrifice, 75–8, 105, 121, 145–7, 178 education, theories of, 61, 160–61, 195, 202 effect, see cause and effect emanation, 123, 132 embodiment, 3, 47–8, 50, 56, 60, 64, 68–70, 73–4, 81–2, 91–2, 96–8, 104, 114, 120, 130, 139, 145, 156, 176, 182, 184–5, 187–8, 203 see also disembodiment embrace, see comportment empiricism, 1, 3–4, 5–8, 10–40, 44–6, 48–51, 55–61, 64–5, 68, 73, 82–9, 91, 95, 99, 106, 116, 118, 123, 137, 140, 159, 165, 167, 184–5, 192 see also perception; philosophy of the five senses enemy, the, 15–17, 20, 74, 79, 115, 126, 163, 178–9 see also friendly enemy energy, 14, 23, 27, 35, 54, 63, 68–70, 77, 93–4, 96, 112, 115, 129, 136, 143, 151, 158, 165, 171, 173, 188–9, 194 see also desire engraving concept of, 18, 154–8, 163, 167 projects Blake worked on, 8, 14, 57, 148, 166–7, 202 Enitharmon, 69 Enlightenment, the, 8, 28, 32, 48, 54, 61, 68, 72, 81–4, 99, 151, 179, 193 Blake’s response to, 1, 4–9, 11, 14–15, 17, 23, 26, 32, 40, 44, 47–8, 66, 68, 88–92, 117, 133, 151 see also counter-enlightenment; post-enlightenment enmity, 15–17, 72, 97, 178–80

Index 213 enthusiasm, 1, 4–6, 8, 20, 38, 77, 81, 88, 113, 126, 129, 131–3, 159, 167 see also demonic, the; orgiastic, the epistemology, 2, 4–5, 8–9, 10–28, 33, 51, 61, 68, 73, 91, 102, 130, 143, 156–61, 179, 181 see also empiricism Erdman, David V., 16, 23, 26, 113–14, 124, 125, 135–6, 144–5, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201 eschatology, 72 essence, 9, 15, 34, 38, 45, 67, 72, 83, 87, 97–8, 104, 166, 171–6, 180–1, 184–89, 198 see also substance Essick, Robert N., 155–6, 158, 193, 201, 202 Eternals, the, 61, 66 Eternity, 2, 18, 23–4, 31, 34, 46, 53–4, 62–74, 77, 80, 85, 90–1, 96–9, 107–8, 115, 132, 134, 142, 166, 168, 172–3, 185–7, 201, 202 see also Infinity; time ethics, 23, 46–50, 77, 79–80, 133, 164, 171–2, 180–1 Europe a Prophecy, 74, 77, 129, 153, 155 evil, 47, 93–4, 96–7, 112, 118, 123, 125, 135, 142, 158, 160, 169, 174–6 execution, see conception and execution exegesis, 3, 21, 36, 38, 68, 77, 87, 92, 118, 128, 183–4 experience, 2–3, 5, 6, 10–15, 17–18, 22, 24, 30–2, 45–50, 54–5, 59–60, 67–9, 71–81, 84–91, 95, 102–3, 106–9, 112, 114–19, 121–3, 126–9, 141, 143, 145–9, 155–6, 163–5, 169, 173, 177, 182, 184, 198, 199, 200 see also empiricism experiment, concept of, 10–14, 24, 36, 39, 54, 95, 150, 187 eye of faith, 82–3, 88–90, 129 eye of reason, 82–3, 88–9 Ezekiel (prophet), 47, 137–8, 182–3 Fairbanks, A. Harris, 194 fall from Eternity, 24, 31, 43, 52–3, 61, 68, 102, 116, 161, 163, 175

fantasy, see phantasy Ferber, Michael, 3, 19, 48–9, 188, 191, 193 fire, 12, 19, 32–4, 54, 63, 66, 93, 96–7, 109, 117, 124, 135, 142–3, 154, 173, 175 For Children: The Gates of Paradise, 134–7, 199 forgiveness, 16–17, 103, 180–1 form, 38, 47–8, 53, 60–1, 67–8, 73–4, 90, 92, 96–7, 106–8, 111, 132, 140, 144, 153–62, 166–76, 181–5, 188–9, 203 For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, 199 Four Zoas, The, 7, 11–13, 21 freemasonry, 108–10, 198 French Revolution, 16, 22, 44, 114, 126–7, 129 friend, 15–17, 20, 26, 74, 79–80, 103, 115, 126, 177–8, 183, 185, 188 friendly enemy, 15–16, 20, 74, 101, 126 see also enemy, the; friend Frosch, Thomas R., 31, 53, 61, 193 Frye, Northrop, 3, 4, 18–19, 27, 51, 191, 200 Fuzon, 63–6 Genesis (Bible), 66, 136 genitalia, 102, 169, 188 Glausser, Wayne, 4, 20, 23, 60–1, 159, 191, 194 Gleckner, Robert F., 95, 125, 197 Glorious Revolution, the, 20 God and the senses/understanding, 9, 11, 14, 31, 37, 43–8, 56, 58, 60, 65, 71, 77, 92, 101–2, 104, 127, 133, 137–9, 142, 145–7, 154, 156, 162, 171, 175, 181, 183, 198 as a man, 14, 34, 46, 48–9, 69, 125, 132, 176–7, 182–3 see also Adam Kadmon; divine humanity body of, 34–7, 39, 72, 90–2, 95–8, 102, 138, 171–2, 175, 180, 182, 185 death of, 90–1, 147, 163 providence of, 114, 116, 126–8

214 Index God – continued relationship with human beings, 3, 18, 38, 50, 59–60, 68–9, 75–80, 84–7, 90, 97–8, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 120–2, 131–2, 162, 164, 175, 177, 179, 185, 189, 198 word of, 71, 78, 83, 87, 90–1, 98, 127–8, 146, 159, 185 good, 15, 80, 92, 137, 176 good and evil, 47, 93–4, 96–7, 135, 142, 175–6 Hacking, Ian, 192 Hagstrum, Jean H., 13, 20, 192 Hall, Carol Louise, 192 Hartley, David, 28, 57, 59, 61, 64, 66–7, 123, 161, 195, 199 hate, 17, 54 see also love and hate Hayley, William, 3, 16, 179 heaven, 19, 46, 63, 65, 76–7, 80, 89–90, 93, 97, 105–7, 110, 114, 117, 120–1, 142, 145–6, 189, 200 hell, 16, 19, 33–4, 76, 93, 105, 114, 116–19, 154, 165–6 Hill, Christopher, 79, 85, 196 Hilton, Nelson, 193 Hindmarsh, James, 192 Hindmarsh, Robert, 115, 192, 197, 198 Hirst, Desiree, 4, 191, 197 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 18–19, 38–9, 82–4, 86–91, 96, 104, 118, 194 human beings/humanity, 1, 3–4, 9, 10–16, 18, 25–6, 28, 31–7, 39, 44, 46–9, 51, 53, 55–60, 68–9, 71–4, 83–92, 96–8, 107, 111–13, 116–18, 121–3, 126, 129–37, 139, 142–7, 152–3, 157, 159–69, 172, 174–82, 185, 188–9, 197, 200 Hume, David, 8, 14, 23–4, 192 identity artistic, 18, 48, 155, 170 as sameness, 7, 164, 169, 180, 184, 187, 189

personal, 18, 32–4, 47–8, 64, 74, 78, 108, 116, 124, 153–4, 161–4, 170–6, 180–1, 184, 189–90 political, 115, 162 ideology, concept of, 18, 144, 162, 181, 202 see also opinion illuminated printing, 4, 7, 11, 18, 32–3, 185, 187, 198 imagination, 2, 11, 37, 97, 123, 150–1, 154, 200 see also Poetic Genius immaterialism, 36–7 impulse, 14, 48–9, 57, 72, 133, 140, 154–5, 159, 161, 176, 189 incarnation, 31, 69, 80, 90, 92, 125, 138–9, 176, 182–3, 189 Infinity, 45–6, 50, 185 see also Eternity inheritance (cultural), 1–2, 6–7, 13, 15, 19, 21–2, 26, 28, 33, 52, 55, 73–5, 80–1, 91, 94–5, 98–9, 118, 126, 133, 153, 171, 179 concept of, 21–2 innocence, 169, 200 inspiration, 2, 14, 16, 18, 23, 86–7, 126–7, 136, 138, 154–6, 182, 201 invention, see conception and execution Isaiah, 79, 137–8, 158, 182–3 Island in the Moon, An, 23–6, 35 Jerusalem, 132, 133 Jerusalem, 7, 11–12, 18, 21, 147, 156 Jesus Christ, 37–9, 67, 76, 89, 90, 92, 100–4, 107, 121, 128, 132, 138, 146–7, 164–5, 173–4, 178–9, 187–9, 197 wounds of, 101–2 Job (Bible), 134, 136 John (Bible), 178 Johnson, Joseph, 6, 16, 19, 35, 57 Johnson, Mary Lynn, 53, 194 Jordan, Susanna, 45, 195 joy, 52, 61–2, 66, 77, 91–3, 96, 142, 152, 154, 177 judgement human, 10, 76, 132, 157–8, 166 moral, 137, 174

Index 215 Kabbalah, 4, 73, 101, 106, 132 Kittel, Harald A., 64, 195 language, concept of, 18, 58, 122, 128, 155, 168 Laocoön, The, 71 Larrissy, Edward, 2, 9, 74, 144, 153–6, 166, 184, 186, 191, 193, 202, 203 Lavater, John Casper, 9, 15, 33, 47, 56, 116, 131–3, 142, 165–8, 171–81, 185–7, 189, 191, 192, 202 law, 36, 49–50, 64–6, 68–70, 78, 83–4, 101, 104, 131, 133–4, 142, 164–5, 173–4, 200 Law, William, 4 liberty, 17, 39–40, 47, 115, 139–41, 148, 152–3, 161–2, 181–2, 185 light, 65, 77, 91, 93, 96, 101, 110–12, 139, 149–51, 168 interiorisation of, 49, 73, 75–81, 97, 104, 132–3, 145–6, 149, 162, 188 spiritual, 67, 75, 77, 83, 92–3, 96, 99, 111–12, 121, 145–7, 150–1, 175, 184, 188, 200 Locke, John, 1, 3–4, 6, 8–9, 10–34, 40, 45–7, 50–61, 69, 76, 80, 83–4, 87–8, 99, 106, 115, 125–6, 156–61, 164, 167, 169, 184, 189, 193, 196 logos, 37, 185, 197 London Universal Society, 109, 115, 198 Los, 2, 21, 61–2, 69, 74, 163 Los, Book of, 155, 165, 199 Los, Song of, 52 love, 60, 76, 93, 97, 101–4, 108, 110, 113, 120–3, 130, 132, 145–6, 151, 153, 163, 165–6, 171, 175, 177–82, 185, 190, 198, 201, 203 conjugal, 75, 107–10, 121, 143, 151, 153–4, 171, 174 see also love and hate love and hate, 54, 69, 72, 93, 95–6 see also hate; love Lowth, Robert, 138, 199 Luke (Bible), 178

Makdisi, Saree, 147, 200 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 13–14, 24–6, 33–5, 37–9, 43, 46–50, 53–4, 69–70, 75–6, 80, 89, 93–5, 98–9, 100, 105–6, 109–16, 119–21, 124–5, 129, 132–5, 137, 139, 146, 150–2, 154, 158–9, 165, 169, 177, 179, 182–4, 186, 188–9, 195, 199, 201 Marx, Karl, 125 materialism, 2, 7, 28, 35–6, 55–8, 89–90, 95, 96, 98–9 see also Visionary Materialism matter, 29–36, 53–8, 61, 67, 71, 89, 94, 96, 157, 166 Matthew (Bible), 75–6, 79 Mee, Jon, 126, 129, 191, 199, 200 mental fight, 23 messianic, the, 4, 42, 79, 88–9, 124, 161, 183–4, 186 Milton a Poem in 2 Books, 7, 18–19, 37, 147, 155, 163, 201 Milton, John, 6, 13, 45, 49, 172, 199, 201 mind, 24, 26–34, 45, 54, 58, 60–1, 64, 67, 101, 104, 123, 125, 157–62, 175 see also dualism (mind–body) miracle, 84, 86, 187–8 monarchy, 20, 49, 64–5, 71, 79, 90, 114–15, 127, 133, 140, 174, 178, 184 morality, 15, 42–3, 46–7, 51, 57, 59–61, 64–6, 68, 70, 94, 100–1, 131–5, 137, 142, 147, 151, 153, 158, 160–6, 173–4, 195 Moravian Brethren, 3, 5, 75, 81, 88, 100–5, 106, 115, 118, 121, 129, 132–3, 138, 153, 196–7, 201 Muggleton, Lodowick, 71, 82–91, 97, 128 Muggletonianism, 5, 71, 82–91, 97, 99, 102, 104, 106, 129 muse, 18, 155, 201 mysterium tremendum, 80, 90, 129, 146–7, 163 see also crucifixion; passion (suffering)

216 Index mystery, 20, 37–9, 41–5, 50, 59, 78, 80–1, 98, 161, 197 opening of, 68–9, 72–3, 78–81, 87, 91–2, 98, 100–3, 108, 127–9, 133, 145, 148 see also secret, the mysticism, 3, 6, 8, 75 see also Behmenism; Kabbalah narrative, 66, 119 natural idea, 120, 158, 162, 169, 171 necessitarianism, see determinism nervous system, 45, 57–66, 104, 123, 201 New Jerusalem Church, see Church New Jerusalem Magazine, 108, 197, 198 newness, 27, 33, 60, 76, 79, 89, 100, 157, 187 Nicholson, William, 36, 194 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 154, 164 obscurity, 43, 44–5, 50, 55–6, 62, 64–5, 70, 80, 108, 168, 185 onto-theology, 21, 33, 48, 78, 81, 88, 92, 112, 125, 130, 137, 146, 163 ontology, 2–5, 15, 18, 21, 23–4, 34, 46, 50, 68, 72, 98, 102, 112, 118, 122, 148–9, 152, 160, 165–6, 179 Oothoon, 25, 52, 140–54, 180–1, 200 opinion, 17, 27, 32, 39, 47, 117, 159–61, 185 see also ideology, concept of opposition, 2, 20, 120, 183 oppression economic/political, 87, 142, 184 mental, 37, 142, 144, 184 sexual, 142–3, 152 Orc, 19, 69 organic, the, 3, 82, 135–9, 150, 174, 184 orgiastic, the, 80–1, 100, 133 see also demonic, the; enthusiasm Ostriker, Alicia, 200 other, 7, 16–18, 31–2, 49–50, 74–81, 90, 101, 104, 108, 118, 121–4, 129, 134, 147, 154–6, 161, 163–4, 176–81 see also alterity; self and other Otto, Peter, 18, 31, 141, 193

outline, see bounding line Ovid, 152 paganism, 35–7, 42, 133 Paine, Thomas, 6, 8, 16, 19, 22, 40, 47–9, 71, 138, 178, 187–8, 194, 195 Paley, Morton D., 35, 54, 194, 200, 202 pantheism, see divine immanence paradise, 31, 49, 134–5 Parisi, Frank M., 134–6, 199 passion (emotion), 44–5, 62–3, 66–7, 69, 116, 123, 143, 165, 177–9 passion (suffering), 3, 66, 89–90, 100, 104, 144–7, 178–9 see also crucifixion; mysterium tremendum perception, 3, 6, 11, 13–14, 23–4, 27, 29–34, 44–57, 60, 63, 67, 73, 77, 80, 82–5, 88–92, 98–9, 111–12, 128–9, 134, 137–43, 147, 149–50, 152, 156–8, 161–2, 165–6, 180–3 see also empiricism; philosophy of the five senses perhaps, the, 5, 50, 72–4, 79, 112 phantasy, 62, 109, 112, 118–20, 125, 144, 181, 185 philosophy of the five senses, 11, 33, 144, 156 see also empiricism; perception physiognomy, 9, 104, 166–7, 172–5, 184–5 physiology, 28, 51, 59–61, 104 physionomy, 166–7 pity, 41–3 Plato, 31, 81, 133 Platonism/neo-platonism, 37, 80, 101, 137, 197 Poetic Genius, 11, 34, 37, 46, 47–50, 67, 69, 71, 73, 88, 92, 109, 120–3, 130, 138–9, 166–7, 172, 176, 185 see also imagination poetic idea, 120, 130, 171, 182, 185 Poetical Sketches, 139–40 post-enlightenment, 72, 81, 95 postmodernism, 184 priesthood, 32, 38, 43, 64–5, 68, 79, 88, 119, 134–5, 137–8, 174, 178, 184, 197, 199

Index 217 Priestley, Joseph, 5–6, 8, 16, 28, 34–40, 42–3, 46, 48, 53–61, 64, 67, 69, 90, 95–8, 101, 104, 106, 123, 125–6, 128, 161, 167, 185, 194, 195, 197, 199 printing press, 186, 188 Proctor, Percival and William Catieau, 174, 203 prophecy, 2, 9, 12–14, 79, 84–2, 112, 127–9, 135, 138, 140, 145–50, 154, 158, 183–8 prophetic vision, 18, 84–5, 95, 112–15, 126–30, 142, 148–50, 173, 184–8 Protestantism, 1, 4, 20, 49, 99, 171 Psalms, 134 psychology, 13, 24, 27–32, 56–61, 66, 122, 145, 161 qualities, 18, 29, 33, 92–3, 120, 172–5, 185 primary and secondary, 29–31, 51 radicalism, political, 19, 48–9, 108, 114, 126, 129 Raine, Kathleen, 5, 93, 95–6, 191 Ranters, the, 5, 73–82, 88, 127 reason, 14, 31, 35, 37, 43–4, 54, 56, 63, 69, 80, 82–92, 95, 100, 116–17, 119, 123, 125, 197 Reay, Barry, 86, 196 redemption, 2–4, 9, 11–12, 17–18, 20–1, 23, 38–9, 60, 68, 76, 88, 90, 97, 100, 102, 105, 120, 123, 135–7, 139, 142, 147–8, 152, 161–4, 169, 173, 176–7, 184–8 Reeve, John, 82, 85–9, 97, 196 repetition, 43, 66, 161, 186–7 repulsion, see attraction and repulsion restraint, 1, 37, 137, 165, 173 resurrection, 38, 76, 96–7, 104, 107, 197 revelation, 50, 79, 83–9, 122 Revelation (Bible), 127, 196 revolution, see French Revolution; Glorious Revolution, the Reynolds, Joshua, 10–11, 22–3, 44, 168 Ricoeur, Paul, 32, 192 Robson, William, 168–70, 188, 203 Rushdie, Salman, 171, 182, 190, 203

Sabri-Tabrizi, Gholam Reza, 110, 114, 198 Salmon, Joseph, 76–80, 127, 196 Schock, Peter A., 194 Schuchard, Marsha Keith, 5, 75, 81–2, 101–4, 107–10, 115, 121, 132, 191, 196, 197, 198, 201 sculpture, 202–3 secret, the, 21, 39, 43, 50, 65, 70, 76–81, 98, 100, 103–4, 108, 129, 133, 153, 162–3, 172, 178–81, 203 see also mystery seed of faith and seed of reason, see eye of faith; eye of reason self, 17–18, 45, 56, 74, 80, 170, 177–8, 181 and divine influx/possession, 47–9, 67–9, 77–80, 81, 100, 103–5, 121, 134, 154–6, 162–4, 169, 179–80 Lockean self, 9, 31–2, 64, 80, 156–63, 169, 179, 184 punctual self, 28–9, 61, 80, 159 self and other, 7, 15, 18, 24, 32, 69, 102, 121, 146, 155–9, 164, 180–4 see also other; self sensation, organic, 11, 13, 26–35, 45–6, 50–2, 55–8, 63, 67, 74–6, 111, 116, 143–4, 156–8, 161–2, 200 sensation, spiritual, 76, 82–91, 111, 137, 140, 147 sexuality fallen, 102, 142–3, 153, 169, 200 female, 52, 102, 142–3, 200 liberated/redemptive, 74–5, 102, 107–8, 141, 169, 188, 200 spiritual significance of, 108, 121, 129–30, 133–4, 147, 153–4 Shakespeare, William, 49, 99, 195 signature, the, 175–6 sin, 1, 63–4, 90, 123, 146–7, 174 slavery, 18–20, 24, 60, 145 Songs of Innocence and Experience, 24, 42, 155, 160, 203 space, 34, 36, 120, 123, 138, 157–7, 161, 173, 181

218 Index spectre, the, 20–2, 54, 67, 73–4, 78, 80–1, 101, 113, 115, 125, 178, 193 speech, 122–3, 155, 158, 175–6, 203 Spinoza, Benedict de, 34, 47, 164–5, 172, 194 spirit, 2, 14, 20–1, 31–2, 35–7, 48, 54, 61, 71, 74, 76, 84, 90, 92–3, 101, 107, 111–12, 119, 123, 125, 137, 142, 146, 150, 158–9, 166–7, 175–6 spiritual idea, see poetic idea stamina, 164, 174–5, 185 sublime, the, 44–50, 59, 64, 68, 78, 98, 156, 168, 177 and the beautiful, 22 substance, 34, 39, 53–6, 73, 96, 171–7, 180–1, 185–9 spiritual, 83–91, 106, 113 see also accident; essence substitution, 178 suffering, see passion (suffering) superstition, 4, 39–40, 49, 82, 159, 180 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 3–4, 6, 46, 73, 75, 88, 94–9, 100–1, 105–27, 145–6, 150–1, 158, 165–6, 171, 183–5, 195, 197, 198, 203 Swedenborgianism, 12, 108–15, 146, 153 sympathy, 60, 104, 147 Taylor, Charles, 28–9, 31, 162, 192 Taylor, Edward, 93, 197 Thel, The Book of, 36 theology, 4, 21, 36, 49–50, 75, 82, 85, 87, 165 see also blood theology; onto-theology There is No Natural Religion, 7, 12–13, 54, 84, 99, 117, 137, 150, 176, 186, 191, 194 Thompson, E.P., 4–5, 81–2, 86, 91, 109, 114, 129, 191, 195, 196 time, 34, 62, 72, 85, 103–4, 127, 158, 173, 175, 186–7 tincture, 172–3

transcendentalism, 7, 33–6, 47, 50, 84, 164, 180 see also immaterialism Tree of Knowledge, the, 42, 135 Tree of Mystery, the, 41–3, 64–6, 161, 185 understanding, the, 18, 31, 92, 98, 101, 110–12, 139, 145–7, 154, 165, 188, 198 Urizen, 12, 14, 25–6, 29, 45, 52, 60–70, 111, 143–5 Urizen, The First Book of, 2, 13–14, 24, 25, 45, 52, 54, 61–70, 111, 119, 137, 155, 161–3, 165, 195 variety, 7, 48, 50, 77, 164, 169–72, 180, 185, 187–9 vice, 1, 42, 131, 174, 195 Vincent, William, 195 Vine, Steve, 193 virtue, 1, 42–3, 47, 49, 98, 115–16, 162–5, 175–6 Viscomi, Joseph, 7, 33, 76, 94–5, 138, 154, 156, 171, 187, 191, 193, 197, 199, 201 Visionary Materialism, 2–3, 70, 73, 82–4, 91, 102, 129, 159–64, 185 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 51, 79, 112, 137, 140–54, 180–4, 189–90 visor effect, 67, 78, 101 Watson, Richard, 11, 22, 45–7, 137, 188 Whale, John C., 44, 194 White, Harry, 11–12, 192 will, 38, 43, 64, 72, 77, 83, 102, 145, 158, 175, 201 Williams, Nicholas M., 18, 144, 161, 183–4, 193, 203 withdrawal, see comportment Worrall, David, 5, 8, 66, 109, 129, 149–50, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 200

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