Blake's Faith: Introduction

This blog leads (hopefully to improvement of the website (and book) called Ramhorn'd with Gold. And this post will (hopefully) be inserted in the beginning of Chapter Four, entitled Faith.

I know few (if any) ordained ministers who 'have any time for' William Blake; yet he was such a religious man! He proposed an alternative to the sterile polity of the established church of his day (and also for ours, using the word 'established' in a very general sense.

Ordained ministers, generally speaking, represent what we have called here, the established church, be they Catholic priests or Pentecostal preachers. At best they must consider Blake's religious ideas a threat; hence they're most apt to studiously avoid them.

But a few Blakeans have found Blake's religious ideas creative, even life giving.
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"Everything that lives is holy" (end of MHH). That represents Blake's faith in a nutshell.
There were no sinners in Blake's world (which should please Quakers). Like many Quakers Blake's God was an immanent one, not an old gentleman sitting on a throne in the sky. As Quakers say, there is that of God in you (and me, and Everyman.)

Blake was in essence a Christian Universalist, although he likely would have denied the term. he believed that Everyman would work through his errors (not sins) in the end (whatever the end might be).

All of this may lead one to understand why the very religious William Blake was so uniformly ignored by the clergy, and so enthusiastically accepted by many of the alternative culture. The 'flower children' of the sixties greeted Blake with joy (and perhaps unfortunately took up his sexual ideas too enthusiastically, leading to much suffering over the long haul).

You may want to move on at this point to Blake's Faith.