Part 11

Such is the radical "idea" of the poem; and as to details, we are to remember that "modesty" with Blake means a timid and tacit prurience, and "humility" a mistrustful and mendacious cowardice: he puts these terms to such uses in his swift fierce way, just as, in his detestation of deism and its "impersonal God," he must needs embody his vision of a deity or more perfect humanity in the personal Christian type: a purely poetical tendency, which if justly apprehended will serve to account for the wildest bodily forms in which he drew forth his visions from the mould of prophecy.

Thus much by way of prologue may suffice for the moral side of this "Gospel"; the mythological or technically religious side is not much easier to deal with, and indeed cannot well be made out except by such misty light as may be won from the prophetic books. It seems evident that Blake, at least for purposes of evangelism, was content to regard the "Creator" of the mere bodily man as one with the "legal" or "Pharisaic" God of the churches: even as the "mother of his mortal part"--of the flesh taken for the moment simply, and separated (for reasoning purposes) from the inseparable spirit--is "Tirzah." This vision of a creator divided against his own creation and having to be subdued by his own creatures will appear more directly and demand more distinct remark when we come to deal with its symbolic form in the great myth of "Urizen;" where also it will be possible to follow it out with less likelihood of offensive misconstruction. One is compelled here to desire from those who care to follow Blake at all, the keenest ardour of attention possible; they will blunder helplessly if they once fail to connect this present minute of his work with the past and the future of it: if they once let slip the thinnest thread of analogy, the whole prophetic or evangelic web collapses for them into a chaos of gossamer, a tangle of unclean and flaccid fibres, the ravelled woof of an insane and impotent Arachne, who should be retransmuted with all haste into a palpable spider by the spell of reason. Here, as in all swift "inspired" writing, there are on the outside infinite and indefinable anomalies, contradictions, incompatibilities enough of all sorts; open for any Paine or Paley to impugn or to defend. But let no one dream that there is here either madness or mendacity: the heart or sense thus hidden away is sound enough for a mystic.

The greatest passage of this poem is also the simplest; that division which deals with the virtue of "chastity," and uses for its text the story of "the woman taken in adultery:" who is identified with Mary Magdalene. We give it here in full; hoping it may now be comprehensible to all who care to understand, and may bear fruit of its noble and almost faultless verse for all but those who prefer to take the sterility of their fig-tree on trust rather than be at the pains of lifting a single leaf.

"Was Jesus _chaste_? or did he Give any lessons of chastity? The morning blushed fiery red; Mary was found in adulterous bed. Earth groaned beneath, and heaven above Trembled at discovery of love. Jesus was sitting in Moses' chair; They brought the trembling woman there. Moses commands she be stoned to death: What was the sound of Jesus' breath? He laid his hand on Moses' law; The ancient heavens, in silent awe, Writ with curses from pole to pole, All away began to roll; The earth trembling and naked lay In secret bed of mortal clay-- On Sinai felt the hand Divine Pulling[34] back the bloody shrine-- And she heard the breath of God As she heard by Eden's flood: 'Good and Evil are no more; Sinai's trumpets, cease to roar; Cease, finger of God, to write The heavens are not clean in thy sight. Thou art good, and thou alone; Nor may the sinner cast one stone. To be good only, is to be A God, or else a Pharisee. Thou Angel of the Presence Divine, That didst create this body of mine, Wherefore hast thou writ these laws And created hell's dark jaws? _My_ Presence I will take from thee; A cold leper thou shalt be. Though thou wast so pure and bright That heaven was impure in thy sight, Though thine oath turned heaven pale, Though thy covenant built hell's gaol, Though thou didst all to chaos roll With the serpent for its soul, Still the breath Divine does move-- And the breath Divine is love. Mary, fear not. Let me see The seven devils that torment thee. Hide not from my sight thy sin, That forgiveness thou mayst win. Hath no man condemned thee?' 'No man, Lord.' 'Then what is he Who shall accuse thee? Come ye forth, Fallen fiends of heavenly birth That have forgot your ancient love And driven away my trembling dove; You shall bow before her feet; You shall lick the dust for meat; And though you cannot love, but hate, Shall be beggars at love's gate. --What was thy love? Let me see't; Was it love or dark deceit?' 'Love too long from me has fled; 'Twas dark deceit, to earn my bread; 'Twas covet, or 'twas custom, or Some trifle not worth caring for: That they may call a shame and sin Love's temple that God dwelleth in, And hide in secret hidden shrine The naked human form divine, And render that a lawless thing On which the soul expands her wing. But this, O Lord, this was my sin-- When first I let these devils in, In dark pretence to chastity Blaspheming love, blaspheming thee. Thence rose secret adulteries, And thence did covet also rise. My sin thou hast forgiven me; Canst thou forgive my blasphemy? Canst thou return to this dark hell And in my burning bosom dwell? And canst thou die that I may live? And canst thou pity and forgive?'"

In no second poem shall we find such a sustained passage as that; such light of thought and thunder of verse; such sudden splendour of fire seen across a strange land and among waste places beyond the receded landmarks of the day or above the glimmering lintels of the night. The passionate glory of its rapid and profound music fills the sense with too deep and sharp a delight to leave breathing-space for any thought of analytic or apologetic work. But the spirit of the verse is not less great than the body of it is beautiful. "Divide from the divine glory the softness and warmth of human colour--subtract from the divine the human presence--subdue all refraction to the white absolute light--and that light is no longer as the sun's is, warm with sweet heat of life and liberal of good gifts; but foul with overmuch purity, sick with disease of excellence, unclean through exceeding cleanness, like the skin of a leper 'as white as snow.'" For the divine nature is not greater than the human; (they are one from eternity, sundered by the separative creation or fall, severed into type and antitype by bodily generation, but to be made one again when life and death shall both have died;) not greater than the human nature, but greater than the qualities which the human nature assumes upon earth. God is man, and man God; as neither of himself the greater, so neither of himself the less: but as God is the unfallen part of man, man the fallen part of God, God must needs be (not more than man, but assuredly) more than the qualities of man. Thus the mystic can consistently deny that man's moral goodness or badness can be predicable of God, while at the same time he affirms man's intrinsic divinity and God's intrinsic humanity. Man can only possess abstract qualities--"allegoric virtues"--by reason of that side of his nature which he has _not_ in common with God: God, not partaking of the "generative nature," cannot partake of qualities which exist only by right of that nature. The other "God"[35] or "Angel of the Presence" who created the sexual and separate body of man did but cleave in twain the "divine humanity," which becoming reunited shall redeem man without price and without covenant and without law; he meantime, the Creator,[36] is a divine daemon, liable to error, subduable by and through this very created nature of his invention, which he for the present imprisons and torments. _His_ law is the law of Moses, which according to the Manichean heresy Christ came to reverse as diabolic. This singular (and presumably "Pantheistic") creed of Blake's has a sort of Asiatic flavour about it, but seems harder and more personal in its mythology than an eastern philosopher's; has also a distinct western type and Christian touch in it; being wrought as it were of Persian lotus-leaves hardened into the consistency of English oak-timber. The most wonderful part of his belief or theory is this: "That after Christ's death he became Jehovah:"[37] which may mean simply that through Christ the law of liberty came to supplant the bondage of law, so that where Jehovah was Christ is; or may typify the change of evangel into law, of full-grown Christianity into a fresh type of "Judaism," of the Gospel or good news of freedom into the Church or dogmatic body of faith; or may imply that the two forces, after that supreme sacrifice, coalesced and became one, all absolute Deity, being absorbed into the Divine Humanity; or, as a practical public would suggest, may mean or typify nothing. It is certain that Blake appears so far to have accepted the "Catholic tradition" as to regard this death or sacrifice as tending somehow not merely to the redemption of man (which would be no more than the sequel or outcome of his mystic faith in the salvation of man by man, the deliverance or redemption of the accident through the essence), but also to the union of the divine crucified man with the creative governing power. Somehow; but the prophet must explain for himself the exact means. We are now fairly up to the ears in mysticism, and cannot afford to strike out at random, for fear of being carried right off our feet by the ground-swell and drifted into waters where swimming will be yet tougher work.

The belief in "holy insurrection" must be almost as old as the oldest religions or philosophies afloat or articulate. In the most various creeds this feature of faith stands out sharply with a sort of tangible human appeal. Earlier heretics than the author of _Jerusalem_ have taken this to be the radical significance of Christianity; a divine revolt against divine law; an evidence that man must become as God only by resistance to God--"the God of this world;" that if Prometheus cannot, Zeus will not deliver us: and that man, if saved at all, must indeed be saved "so as by fire"--by ardour of rebellion and strenuous battle against the God of nature: who as of old must yet feed upon his children, and will no longer take stone for flesh though never so well wrapped up; who must have the organ of destruction and division, by which alone he lives[38] and has ability to beget, cut off from him with the sharpest edge of flint that rebellious hands can whet. In these galliambics of Blake's we see the flint of Atys whetted for such work; made ready against the priests of Nature and her God, though by an alien hand that will cast no incense upon the altar of Cybele; no Phrygian's, who would spend his own blood to moisten and brighten the high places of her worship: but one ready, with what fire he can get, to burn down the groves and melt down the cymbals of Dindymus.

Returning now to the residue of the immediate matter in hand, we may duly notice in this excursive and all but shapeless poem many of Blake's strong points put forth with all his strength: curiously crossed and intermixed with rough skirmishing attacks on the opposite faction, clerical or sceptical, by way of interlude. "You would have Christ act according to what you call a rational or a philanthropic habit of mind--set the actual God to reason, to elevate, to convince or convert after the fashion in which you would set about it? redeem, not the spiritual man by inspiration of his spirit, but the bodily man by application of his arguments? make him as 'Bacon and Newton'" (Blake's usual types of the mere understanding)?

"For thus the Gospel St. Isaac confutes: 'God can only be known by his attributes; And as to the indwelling of the Holy Ghost Or of Christ and the Father, it's all a boast And pride and vanity of imagination That did wrong to follow this world's fashion.' To teach doubt and experiment Certainly was not what Christ meant."

Certainly also no doggrel can be rougher, looser, heavier-weighted about the wrists and ankles, than this; which indeed it was perhaps hardly fair to transcribe; for take out the one great excerpt already given, and the whole poem is a mass of huddled notes jotted down in a series of hints, on stray sides and corners of leaves, crammed into holes and byways out of sight or reach. So perfect a poet is not to be judged by the scrawls and sketches of his note-book; but as we cannot have his revision of the present piece of work, and are not here to make any revision of our own, we must either let drop the chance of insight thus afforded, or make shift with the rough and ragged remnants allowed us by the sparing fingers of a close-handed fate. And this chance of insight is not to be lightly let go, if we mean to look at all into Blake's creed and mind. "Experiment" to the mystic seems not insufficient merely, but irrational. "Reason says _miracle_; Newton says _doubt_;" as Blake in another place expounds to such disciples as he may get. On this point also his "Vision of Christ" is other than the Christian public's.

"Thine is the friend of all mankind; Mine speaks in parables to the blind."

_His_ Christ cared no more to convince "the blind" by plain speech than to save "the world"--the form or flesh of the world, not that imperishable body or complement of the soul which if a man "keep under and bring into subjection" he transgresses against himself; but the mere "sexual" shell which only exists (as we said) by error and by division and by right of temporal appearance.

Keeping in mind the utter roughness and formal incompletion of these notes--which in effect are the mere broken shell or bruised husk of a poem yet unfledged and unembodied--we may put to some present use the ensuing crude and loose fragments.

"What was he doing all that time From twelve years old to manly prime? Was he then idle, or the less About his Father's business? If he had been Antichrist aping[39] Jesus, He'd have done anything to please us; Gone sneaking into synagogues And not used the elders and priests like dogs; But humble as a lamb or ass Obeyed himself to Caiaphas. God wants not man to humble himself. That is the trick of the ancient Elf. This is the race that Jesus ran: Humble to God, haughty to man; Cursing the rulers before the people Even to the temple's highest steeple; And when he humbled himself to God, Then descended the cruel rod."

(This noticeable heresy is elsewhere insisted on. Its root seems to be in that doctrine that nothing is divine which is not human--has not in it the essence of completed manhood, clear of accident or attribute; servility therefore to a divine ruler is one with servility to a human ruler. More orthodox men have registered as fervent a protest against the degradation involved in base forms of worship; but this singular mythological form seems peculiar to Blake, who was bent on finding in the sacred text warrant or illustration for all his creed.)

"'If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me: Thou also dwell'st in eternity. Thou art a man; God is no more; Thine own humanity learn to adore, For that is my spirit of life. Awake: arise to spiritual strife; And thy revenge abroad display In terror at the Last Judgment Day.'"

(Another special point of faith. "Redemption by forgiveness of sins? yes: but the power of redeeming or forgiving must come by strife. A gospel is no mere spiritual essence of boiled milk and rose-water. There are the energies of nature to fight and beat--unforgivable enemies, embodied in Melitus or Annas, Caiaphas or Lycon. Sin is pardonable; but these things, in the body or out of it, are not pardonable. Revenge also is divine; whatever you may think or say while in the body, there is a part of nature not forgivable, an element in the world not redeemable, which in the end must be cast out and tormented." To the priests of Pharisaic morals or Satanic religion--those who crucify the great "human" nature and "scourge sin instead of forgiving it"--to these the Redeemer must be the tormentor.)

"'God's mercy and long-suffering Are but the sinner to justice to bring. Thou on the cross for them shalt pray-- And take revenge at the last day.' Jesus replied, and thunders hurled: 'I never will pray for the world. Once I did so when I prayed in the garden; I wished to take with me a bodily pardon.'"

These few lines, interpolated by way of comfortable exposition, are more likely to increase the offence and perplexity: but assuredly no irreverent brutality of paradox was here in the man's mind. Even the "divine humanity" of his quasi-Pantheistic worship must give up (he says) the desire of redeeming the unredeemable "world"--the quality subject to law and technical religion. No "bodily pardon" for that, whatever the divine pity may have hoped, while as yet full-grown in love only, not in knowledge--seraphic fire without cherubic light; before, that is, it had perfect insight into the brute nature or sham body of things. That must be put off--changed as a vesture--by the risen and reunited body and soul. What is it that has to be saved? What is it that can be?

"Can that which was of woman born In the absence of the morn, While the soul fell into sleep And (? heard) archangels round it weep, Shooting out against the light Fibres of a deadly night, Reasoning upon its own dark fiction, In doubt which is self-contradiction,"

can that reason itself into redemption? The absolute body and essential soul, as we have said, are with all their energies, passive and active powers and pleasures, natural properties and liberties, of an imperishable and vital holiness; but their appended qualities, their form and law, their morals and philosophies, their reason and religion, these are perishable and damnable. The "holy reasoning power," in whose "holiness is closed the abomination of desolation," must be annihilated. "Rational Truth, root of Evil and Good," must be plucked up and burnt with fire. You cannot, save in an empirical sense, walk by sight and not by faith: you cannot "walk by faith and not by sight," for there is no sight except faith. (Compare generally the _Gates of Paradise_, for illustrations of all these intricate and intense conceptions.) Doubt then, being one of the perishable qualities which depend on externals, is mere impotence and error: now let us hear further:--

"Humility is only doubt And does the sun and moon blot out, Roofing over with thorns and stems The buried soul and all its gems. This life's dim window of the soul Distorts the heavens from pole to pole And leads you to believe a lie When you see with, not through, the eye, That was born in a night, to perish in a night, When the soul slept in the beams of light."

Part of this reappears with no less vigour of evangelic assertion in the _Auguries of Innocence_, but stripped of the repellent haze of mythological form. That poem, full as it is of delicate power and clear sweetness of thought, does not however reproduce in full the emblematic beauty of our last extract: nor does it throw so much light of a fitful flame-like sort upon or over the subtlest profundities of Blake's faith.

Elsewhere, reverting with fresh spirit to the same charge, he demands (or his spectre for him--"This was spoken by my spectre to Voltaire, Bacon, &c."):--

"Did Jesus teach doubt? or did he Give any lessons of philosophy? Charge visionaries with deceiving? Or call men wise for not believing?"

Unhappily the respective answers from Verulam and Cirey have not been registered by a too contemptuous prophet; they would have been worth reading.

The dogma of "Christian humility" is totally indigestible to Blake; he batters upon it with the heaviest artillery of his "gospel."

"Was Jesus humble? or did he Give any proofs of humility? Boast of high things with humble tone, And give with charity a stone?"

Again;

"When the rich learned Pharisee Came to consult him secretly, Upon his heart with iron pen He wrote 'Ye must be born again.' He was too proud to take a bribe: He spoke with authority, not like a Scribe."

Nor can the love of enemies be accepted literally as an endurable doctrine; for "he who loves his enemies hates his friends," in the mind of the too ardent and candid poet, who proceeds to insist that the divine teacher "must mean the mere _love_ of civility" (_amour de convenance_); "and so he must mean concerning humility": for the willing acceptance of death cannot humiliate, and is therefore no test of "humility"[40] in Blake's sense; self-sacrifice in effect implies an "honest triumphant pride." (Here of course the writer drops for a moment the religious view and divine meaning of the Passion, and looks towards Calvary from the simply human side as it appeared to casual bystanders; for here he has only to deal with what he conceives to be errors in the human conception of Christ's human character. "You the orthodox, and you the reasoners, assert through the mouths of your churches or philosophies that purely human virtues are actually predicable of Christ, and appeal for evidence to his life and death. Well and good; we will, to gain ground for argument with you, forget that the Passion is not, and admit that it is, what you would call a purely human transaction. Are then these virtues predicable of it even as such?") A good man who incurs risk of death by his goodness, is too "proud" to abjure that goodness and live; here is none of that you call "humility." Such a man need not have died; "Caiaphas would forgive" if one "died with Christian ease asking pardon" after your "humble" fashion:--

"He had only to say that God was the devil And the devil was God, like a Christian civil; Mild Christian regrets to the devil confess For affronting him thrice in the wilderness;"

and such an one might have become a very Caesar's minion, or Caesar himself. Though of course mainly made up of violent quibbling and perversities of passionate humour, which falls to work in this vehement way upon words as some personal relief (a relief easily conceivable in Blake's case by any student of his life), all this has also its value in helping us to measure according to what light we may have in us the stronger and weaker, the worse and better, the graver and lighter sides of the man. It belongs evidently to the period when he painted portraits of the dead and transcribed _Jerusalem_ from spiritual dictation. "This," he lets us know by way of prelude or opening note, "is what Joseph of Arimathaea said to my Fairy," or natural spiritual part by which he conversed with spirits. Next in his defiant doggrel he calls on "Pliny and Trajan"--heathen learning and heathen power or goodness--to "come before Joseph of Arimathaea" and "listen patient." "What, are you here?" he asks as if in the direct surprise of vision. (I will not give these roughest notes in the perfection of their pure doggrel. As verse, serious or humorous, they are irreclaimable and intolerable; what empirical value they may have must be wrung out of them with all haste.)

We may now as well look into a later division of the poem, where Christ is tempted of Satan to obey.