How Blake Read the Gospel

All his life Blake read the Bible, loved it, and engaged in dialogue with its immortal authors. Virtually every line of his poetry and every picture he painted had direct reference to some biblical idea that Blake had meditated upon.

In vivid contrast many of the orthodox don't read the Bible at all; they just wave it! Little wonder they dislike Blake. His early ironic description of his work as the Bible of Hell certainly helped to confirm their prejudice.

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"Thou read'st black where I read white." ( Everlasting Gospel.

There are essentially two ways to read the Bible; Blake referred to them as black and white. What did he mean? We might look at Urizen's Book of Brass as the black book. It's a book of rules, a book of law. It tells people what to do, and more poignantly, what not to do.

Even today ordinary people see the Bible in this way, which helps to explain why hardly anyone reads it today. The few who do read it dutifully and dully. Such a reading constrains consciousness; it makes the reader obedient and unimaginative. The faithful few who feel that they should read their Bible often approach it in a child like way bordering on the childish. Reading the black book inhibits the imagination, deadens the mind and prevents spiritual development. At its worst it has led to many instances of religious persecution and mass murder.

But Blake read it white. The white book is not a book of rules, but a book of visions, a book of wonders. It provokes thought, causes the imagination to soar. Blake must have learned to read at about the age of four, when he had his first vision-- the frightful face at the window. Perhaps we've all been frightened by the Bible in one way or another; most people have had a sufficiently negative experience to leave it strictly alone. But little William overcame his fright and kept reading, and the next vision we hear of was more positive--a tree full of angels.

All the evidence suggests that for the next sixty five years Blake's Bible reading and his visions went hand in hand; his art is the record of it all. Whoever becomes really interested in Blake's visions will find himself reading the Bible because that's where most of them begin. In spite of this his secular critics have looked all over the world for his sources.

One of the greatest things that Blake has to offer the reader is that he makes you see and read the Bible in a new and better way. Not for nothing did the youthful circle of admirers of Blake's last years refer to him as the Interpreter.

The black book has most often been read as law, as history, in a restricted, literal interpretation. If the priest can get people to see it this way, and only this way, then he has secure control over his flock of sheep. In contrast Blake suggests that it's symbolic. Although written in categories of time and space, the temporal dimension is only instrumental; it points to the Beyond, the Eternal, the Real.

Too often people reading 'black' concern themselves with foolish questions such as "Did it really happen? Was Jonah really swallowed by the whale, or rather by the big fish?" But in Blake's vision that isn't the important thing. The important thing is "What does it mean?" The reader of the black book gets himself tied up in knots about the veracity or historicity of Jonah and his aquatic friend.

Blake shows you the Jonah in your psyche and helps you get some grasp of what the turbulent sea means to you personally. It's experiential, exciting! it puts you in touch with reality!, which is not material at all but spiritual. Literal or symbolic is black or white, and probably the two minds will never meet. At this point I simply urge you to join Blake and read white:

"Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because [it is] addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason?"
(Letter To Trusler; Erdman 702-3)

All of the above is taken from Chapter Six of the Blake Primer.

INTRODUCTION TO OUR BLOG

This is a repost of an earlier post intended to help Blake students get started:

An anonymous reader has asked that we provide more information in our posts. So I will try to explain what we are attempting to do in our Blake blog.

First we want to focus our attention on William Blake and his writing.

We are not experts but students of Blake. We follow our own interests. We are interested in sharing what we have learned of Blake and would would like to tailor our posts to the interests of the reader. We hope readers will let us know what interests them about Blake.

There have been posts which attempt to introduce the reader to studying Blake especially using the resources on the internet. The links to the text of Blake's poetry and prose, and to his graphic works are provided. A link to Larry's online book which includes a primer is also a useful tool. (These files can be electronically searched for specific topics.) Within the posts we often provide links to external files which expand the study to wider sources.

None of Blake's work is simple to understand. Beginners can start with Songs of Innocence and Experience. Marriage of Heaven and Hell grabs the attention of many with its irony. The major prophecies can be approached a little at a time rather than entire. If you are visually oriented, the visual images can be used as an avenue to draw you into reading the poetry.

Blake's body of work is large and complex. On our blog we have not attempted a systematic study. We are giving clues to solving the mystery. Analysts of Blake's work often tell us that Blake expected the reader to go beyond what was stated in the text, to perceive the underlying meaning. We hope our readers will sift through the blog posts looking for cracks or doors or highways through which they may enter Blake's mind and heart and imagination.

Reading Blake may expand your mind, nourish your spirit, or enrich your imagination; don't expect it to put money in your pocket, expand your social circle or impress your professors.

Here are some earlier posts which may help the neophyte.

Bible
Perception
Vision
Emphasis
Help
Fourfold
Idealism
Reader
Plates
4Z's




I can't end without a quote from Blake as well as the picture.
Liberty or Stems of Vegetation

Jerusalem, Plate 60, (E 209)

"within the Furnaces the Divine Vision appeard

On Albions hills: often walking from the Furnaces in clouds
And flames among the Druid Temples & the Starry Wheels
Gatherd Jerusalems Children in his arms & bore them like
A Shepherd in the night of Albion which overspread all the Earth

I gave thee liberty and life O lovely Jerusalem
And thou hast bound me down upon the Stems of Vegetation"

MALE/FEMALE

Quoting from Larry Clayton's online Blake book, RAM HORN'D WITH GOLD concerning the role that the male/ female dichotomy plays in Blake's system, we read:

"Man in Eternity is androgynous. In Beulah, which means Married, the sexes are divided into loving and restful contraries. With the Fall the Female Will becomes dominant; the Human Form deteriorates to the sexual in which male and female, spirit and matter, exist in a state of constant warfare. Man has fallen into the fourth world of Ulro. But whatever falls may rise again."

Larry quoted the following passage from Milton Percival who quoted it from Franz Hartman; it is worth passing on again: "Woman as such represents the will (including love and desire), and man as such represents intellect (including the imagination).Woman represents substance; man represents spirit. Man imagines; woman executes. Man creates images; woman renders them substantial.
"The divine man (the angel) is male and female in one; such Adam was before the woman became separated from him. He is like the sun; the woman as such resembles the moon, receiving her light from the sun, and man without woman (in him) is a consuming fire in want of fuel."

Larry Clayton says: " This means that Blake (and Paracelsus) in their use of sex have a primarily metaphysical rather than a physical connotation."

Read more in RAM HORN'D WITH GOLD.

Gates of Paradise Picture 16

We're approaching the end of Gates of Paradise. After the end of a life there's a beginning. Here we have generation; birth and death are simultaneous. We see Mother Earth with the worm, symbol of mortality (and of many other things as well).

Here are the couplets for the (almost) last image:
"16. Thou'rt my Mother, from the womb;
Wife, Sister, Daughter, to the tomb;
Weaving to dreams the Sexual strife,
And weeping over the Web of Life."

To understand this picture we need some familiarity with Blake's use of sex in his myths. It goes back to the earliest literature of our culture, when the sky God was dominant and active while the Earth (Mother) God is passive, receptive, the yin to God's yang.

Digby, page 50: "The realm of the female goddess, the dark, conditioned, Yin side of life, is by itself a place of weeping, of strife, of illusion. It has to be redeemed by its opposite, the contrary state, the light, formative, Apollonian, or Yang side. The ignorant man [the sinner] wanders away into the realm of the Mother, and the farther he goes the more hopeless his lot becomes."

In the Bible such a man was Achan, described in Josahua 7. He had stolen plunder from a battle of Joshua's army for Canaan, the spoils of war, supposed to be belong to God; as a consequence Achan suffered a terrible fate. Blake created a terrible image for this state in Jerusalem plate 25 (Erdman 170-1)

The Valley of Achor became a symbol of failure, of sin, suffering, like a nest of robbers, expressed by the "terrible image" of Plate 25. But we learn from Hosea that there was redemption. Chapter Two portrays the reality of the valley of Achor, but shows a redemptive outlook (beginning with verse 13). Blake was very familiar with the Valley of Achor as it's described in Joshua and in Hosea. In it the ignorant man, the fallen woman suffers, but receives forgiveness and becomes a "door of hope".

This little picture, created by Blake in 1794, was elaborated in the next 20 years into thousands of lines of poetry about female love and eventual redemption.