An audio version of this talk is at my podcast, Talks and Thoughts, available via podcast feeds. The text of the talk is below…
The new issue of VALA, the magazine of the Blake Society, is all about God. I’ve an article in it on Blake’s mystical knowledge of God. You can download VALA here – https://blakesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/VALA-5.pdf.
My piece is entitled, “Enemies of the Human Race”, and in it I’m really wanting to press Blake’s idea of God because I think it can seem strange to the modern mind, to the point of being fundamentally misunderstood.
For instance, from some quotes of Blake, taken in isolation, it can seem as if he held what would nowadays be called a “non-realist” view – as if God were a useful heuristic conjured from a lively imagination or an ideal towards which a creative human person might be drawn.
For example, in The Everlasting Gospel, Blake writes: “Thou art a Man, God is no more, | Thy own humanity learn to adore.”
I think that what has happened is that Blake’s form of Christianity has become strange, though in fact across the course of Christian history, it is not only not strange but in certain quarters, mainstream. Moreover, I believe Blake reckoned we need a revived focus on what would now be called mysticism and gave clear reasons why – which is what I try to lay out in my essay.
At heart, something basic has happened to the western imagination in the centuries since the Reformation. The transcendent has become uncoupled from the immanent. To put it in Blakean terms, we have stopped being able to see a world in a grain of sand or heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of a hand and eternity in an hour.
This has come about partly because religion as a transformation of inner life, also called mysticism, has became a marginal part of Christianity following the Reformation. Figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin were hugely wary of the human psyche, believing it is mostly a source of fantasies and dangers.
At the same time, churches became closely entangled with the new nation states that emerged and Christianity became more of a moral creed than a path of life.
In the UK, the closure of religious houses and monasteries in the 1530s all but destroyed the living wisdom of spiritual traditions that facilitate what Jesus called the discovery of the kingdom of God that is within. Instead, the secular kingdom that is without became the main focus of attention. You belonged or didn’t according to the creed that you did or didn’t verbally confess.
Similarly, the word “religion” began to change meaning, which leads to all sorts of confusions when trying to understand the past. Right up to the 18th century religion mostly referred to the virtues and piety that links people to God, and not to doctrinal systems – which really didn’t become the settled meaning until the invention of sociology in the Victorian period.
So for example, when Blake writes that All religions are one, I think we need to bear the older sense of the word in mind. As Blake puts it, this sense of religion is of the poetic genius, which he describes as the true Man and descended from the Lord. In other words, religion is a practice that fosters the meeting of the finite and infinite. Hence all religions are one because that is what a religious way of life is all about.
What he is most clearly against was the deism that was dominant in his time. Deists undid this meeting of the finite and infinite and instead regarded God as afar off and not a friend – to quote Blake. That has benefits, of course. It clears the imaginative space for the development of the naturalistic descriptions of the world. And with that comes remarkable technology – the modern world, in fact.
But also the seeming need for God appears to dwindle. In other words, deism is the precursor of atheism, which fully emerged after Blake’s death in the later nineteenth century.
Blake saw this separation coming. He railed against deism, calling deists “enemies of the human race” because they separate the transcendent from the immanent – hence the title of my essay.
He also objected to exclusively naturalistic explanations for things. In his poem Milton, he writes: “Every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not A Natural: for a Natural Cause only seems, it is a Delusion of Ulro: & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory” – the perishing Vegetable Memory being a vivid description of an imagination that has closed in on itself because of becoming uncoupled from Eternity.
This conviction was articulated from the earliest days of his work. He could hardly have been more explicit than in the title of almost the first thing he printed: “There is No Natural Religion”.
In that pamphlet he also outlines why natural religion won’t work. It is a closed system, imagining that the human psyche alone has the power to be endlessly inventive.
I realised that this thesis cannot hold when I worked in a psychiatric hospital. There you encounter people whose imaginations have been tragically cut off from the wider world. Blake’s phrase “the same dull round” in this pamphlet is a good description of the repetitive spirals that people suffering in this way become trapped by.
I suspect he would think that much of modern life has become similarly psychotic. The reliance on the empirical and philosophical, as if the material and the narrowly rational were all we need, turns the universe into nothing more than a mill with complicated wheels – anothe expression from There is No Natural Religion.
This denies the true nature of the poetic and prophetic – those aspects of the human psyche that are open and receptive to the infinite, which they receive in their finite creations.
Blake to my mind also unequivocally stresses the traditional theological source of this creativity, also called God. In the final plate of There Is No Natural Religion he engraves: “Therefore God becomes as we are, that we be as he is.”
This phrase is very significant. It was common amongst the first Christian theologians, also called the Church Fathers, as an expression of the core meaning of Christmas and the incarnation. In Eastern Orthodox churches, the dynamic is known as theosis, realising a unity with God. Theosis is also found in western mystical Christianity, but it is generally not stressed or evident in the churches, which are heavily inclined to preaching a sinful abyss that divides God and humanity – almost the opposite.
But theosis is preserved in the mystical traditions, including mainstream figures whom Blake read such as Teresa of Avila. He would likely also have come across it via the Moravians, who were linked to the Eastern Orthodox church, not western ones. And also as research conducted by Susanne shows, he would have known of the Orthodox church directly during his life.
And theosis is the theological idea that pervades his work. He thought our divine humanity needs that transcendent horizon to flourish, not just as a heuristic but as a source and wellspring into which to grow. We are denuded as creatures without it and, moreover, turn to denuding the rest of the natural world around as a result – never satisfied with accumulating because what we humans seek is the All. In a word, God.
Blakean mysticism is all about this telos. He understood that the transcendent is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Our humanity therefore becomes the pathway to the divine, hence writing, “thy own humanity learn to adore” – which he writes, in fact, as the words of God.
In The Everlasting Gospel, God is speaking them to Jesus before Jesus incarnates to communicate that God becomes as we are that we may be as he is. God says:
If thou humblest thyself, thou humblest me;
Thou also dwell’st in Eternity.
Thou art a Man, God [the distant, deistic Nobodaddy] is no more,
Thy own humanity learn to adore.
In other words, when a person is perceived correctly – or, for that matter, when a Grain of Sand, Cloud, Meteor & Star are – then the divine face is seen in that fullness.
Another way of putting it is that Blake did not see Christianity as a historical religion, in the sense that the most important events happened in the past, but rather as one way of understanding the depths of the present. As Blake also puts it:
There is a moment in each day that Satan cannot find. Nor can his watch-fiends find it. But the industrious find this moment and it multiply. And when it once is found it renovates every moment of the day, if rightly placed.
Again that stress on the immediate moment as the place that opens onto the All, onto Eternity, is utterly familiar to the mystical imagination. It sees that God is not afar off. That God is a brother and a friend.
In my view, humanity needs to remember again that “deities reside in the human breast”, again using Blake’s words, because the human breast is also the place where Eternity “glows like the Sun” as Blake writes. Or again, as he has Jesus the Saviour say: “I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine.”.
I realise that this clearly realist view of God is controversial nowadays and the mystical can be taken as simply mystifying – which is partly why Northop Frye thought Blake should be called a visionary, which he is too of course. The point is that I think that Blake would have us engage in the Mental Fight that can recover the full vision. He believed that the fullness of our humanity depends upon it.