Billy Blake - the hippest moral arena around?

[Rit]

Tuatha, you said this on the other board:

Rit, you should be ashamed! If only Blake could hear your rant. Your own reasoning is EXACTLY what Blake detested. Your complete and total lack of spirit and imagination. Tisk Tisk indeed!! You are partially right, he did write the poem to correct Milton. I mean that is obvious in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell when the Devil is speaking and states:

Note: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it."

Satan was a hero in Paradise lost.

And btw, I know you haven't read Milton. It is very obvious, once again you are only using other's critiques of the work. Which I have stressed over and over they didn't understand Blake. They are completely void of imagination and the spirit. You claim Blake knew 'a little' about Druidism? And his motives weren't all that religiously oriented? He used the names of people from both Testaments of the Bible, as well as Druidic names, the names of Oriental gods, and anagrams of Greek gods to inhabit his cosmogony with characters whose epic doings, triumphs and defeats, signify eternal events and physical Creation. All of which, he claims, is the truth revealed to him through the Poetic Genius or imagination, the same Eternal Truth that was revealed to the prophets of the Bible. Blake claimed that Milton was completely divinely inspired and that he wrote it even against his own will. He also called it his grand poem.

i did read about 6 books of Paradise Lost, so you were wrong about that.

and Satan was not the hero. you're such a kidder. He was distinctly the evil guy. Blake didn't mean (with that quote) that Milton made Satan the hero on purpose. He meant that Satan exhibited human and alive qualities, while Jesus seemed like a walking zombie in Paradise Lost... leading Blake to presume that the HUMAN and ALIVE part of Milton contributed to the forming of the character of Satan in the poem, whereas the dead and puritanical and middling and boring side of Milton contributed to the characterization of Jesus.

[Nepenthe]

Did you read this?

athena.english.vt.edu/~exlibris/essays99/vkblake.htm

I don't think Satan was the Hero, nor do I think Milton intended him to be. But certainly in Blake's time people were claiming this.

[Nepenthe]

Here is what Blake thought of the Deists

TO THE DEISTS
The Spiritual States of
the Soul are all Eternal.
Distinguish between the
Man and his present State.

He never can be a friend to the Human Race who is the preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion; he is a flatterer who means to betray, to perpetuate tyrant Pride and the Laws of that Babylon which, he foresees, shall shortly be destroyed with the Spiritual and not the Natural Sword. He is in the State named Rahab; which State must be put off before he can be the Friend of Man.

You, O Deists! profess yourselves the enemies of Christianity, and you are so: you are also the enemies of 1000 the Human Race and of Universal Nature. Man is born a Spectre, or Satan, and is altogether an Evil, and requires a new Selfhood continually, and must continually be changed into his direct Contrary. But your Greek Philosophy, which is a remnant of Druidism, teaches that Man is righteous in his Vegetated Spectre -- an opinion of fatal and accursed consequence to Man, as the Ancients saw plainly by Revelation, to the entire abrogation of Experimental Theory; and many believed what they saw, and prophesied of Jesus.

Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect the synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of this World `God', and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the name of God. Will any one say: `Where are those who worship Satan under the name of God?' Where are they? Listen! Every religion that preaches Vengeance for Sin is the religion of the Enemy and Avenger, and not of the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, named by the Divine Name. Your Religion, O Deists! Deism is the worship of the God of this World by the means of what you call Natural Religion and Natural Philosophy, and of Natural Morality or Self-Righteousness, the selfish virtues of the Natural Heart. This was the religion of the Pharisees who murdered Jesus. Deism is the same, and ends in the same.

Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, Hume charge the spiritually Religious with hypocrisy; but how a Monk, or a Methodist either, can be a hypocrite, I cannot conceive. We are Men of like passions with others, and pretend not to be holier than others; therefore, when a Religious Man falls into sin, he ought not to be call'd a hypocrite: this title is more properly to be given to a player who falls into sin, whose profession is virtue and morality, and the making men self-righteous. Foote, in calling Whitefield hypocrite, was himself one; for Whitefield pretended not to be holier than others, but confessed his sins before all the world. Voltaire! Rousseau! you cannot escape my charge that you are Pharisees and hypocrites; for you are constantly talking of the virtues of the human heart, and particularly of your own; that you may accuse others, and especially the Religious, whose errors you, by this display of pretended virtue, chiefly design to expose. Rousseau thought Men good by nature: he found them evil, and found no friend. Friendship cannot exist without Forgiveness of Sins continually. The book written by Rousseau, call'd his Confessions, is an apology and cloak for his sin, and not a confession.

But you also charge the poor Monks and Religious with being the causes of war, while you acquit and flatter the Alexanders and Caesars, the Louises and Fredericks, who alone are its causes and its actors. But the Religion of Jesus, Forgiveness of Sin, can never be the cause of a war, nor of a single martyrdom.

Those who martyr others, or who cause war, are Deists, but never can be Forgivers of Sin. The glory of Christianity is to conquer by Forgiveness. All the destruction, therefore, in Christian Europe has arisen from Deism, which is Natural Religion.

[Rit]

He never can be a friend to the Human Race who is the preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion; he is a flatterer who means to betray, to perpetuate tyrant Pride and the Laws of that Babylon which, he foresees, shall shortly be destroyed with the Spiritual and not the Natural Sword. He is in the State named Rahab; which State must be put off before he can be the Friend of Man.

the man of natural religion (a deist, if you will) is an unimaginative rationalizer. which is why Blake hated him. He saw that kind of tendency leading to a world with no creativity and no whole persons, just walking principles and theorists. This partially explains why he hated Newton with such spite, which is one of the more dubious things about Blake. Newton was a deist. Blake saw Newton representing the dulling of imagination and intellect into a spiritually void state, leading away from his ideal of where humanity could go. Blake thought that, sure, physics and science were helpful tools, but then he looked around and saw that the people who would inherit these powerful tools were none other than the same deists and fundmentalists and warmongers and tribal foolz he hated before the advent of Newton. What would change in the aftermath? Precious little, and all that would happen was that the bureaucratic zombies would get hold of newer equations to run around in a sandbox with and yet continue to blindly walk through life. Newton indicated NO true advancement for humanity in Blake's eyes, unlike how everyone else seemed to believe that the mere appearance of Newton's gravitational laws instantly meant that humanity had just taken a giant leap forward in time.

You, O Deists! profess yourselves the enemies of Christianity, and you are so: you are also the enemies of 1000 the Human Race and of Universal Nature. Man is born a Spectre, or Satan, and is altogether an Evil, and requires a new Selfhood continually, and must continually be changed into his direct Contrary. But your Greek Philosophy, which is a remnant of Druidism, teaches that Man is righteous in his Vegetated Spectre -- an opinion of fatal and accursed consequence to Man, as the Ancients saw plainly by Revelation, to the entire abrogation of Experimental Theory; and many believed what they saw, and prophesied of Jesus

Man requires a "new Selfhood" continually, he said. Damn straight. The ONLY progress is this universe is NOT in scientific advancement by itself. It is in the mental attitudes of people, percieving the world with imagination, intuition, reason, and humanity. The idiots of his time saw Newton's appearance as indication enough, but they were seeing half the picture. This particular point bothered Blake so much, that i'm pretty sure he would have gone back in time if he could have to specifically assassinate Newton. er.. yeah...

Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect the synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of this World `God', and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the name of God. Will any one say: `Where are those who worship Satan under the name of God?' Where are they? Listen! Every religion that preaches Vengeance for Sin is the religion of the Enemy and Avenger, and not of the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, named by the Divine Name. Your Religion, O Deists! Deism is the worship of the God of this World by the means of what you call Natural Religion and Natural Philosophy, and of Natural Morality or Self-Righteousness, the selfish virtues of the Natural Heart. This was the religion of the Pharisees who murdered Jesus. Deism is the same, and ends in the same.

Yep. Blake knew that there was a spiritual component to life, no matter how hard we try to suppress it. Which is what he saw the deists doing... hypocritically calling themselves religious but really displaying their cold calculating hearts in everything they professed. They had no sense of the divine, no humanity, just attached themselves through cold reason to any passing theory or idol who happened to support their middle class pretensions or their pursuit of wealth, at the expense of the less-fortunate. You will notice the emphasis on Veangeance vs Forgiveness. That was also essential to Blake. Forgiveness ruled the world, was the only human act to take, which was also godlike in its power. Vengeance was the act of small-minds. Blake used the term Deist to refer to these types of people. The crowd of herd thinkers that murdered Jesus - who was nothing but a radical prophet for his time. The larger implication is that the same principle is still with us in society, which is why society is so capricious and self-absorbed. Blake wanted to see the same radicalism (which represented the Good for him) transform the universe once more. And that would not come at the hands of Issac Newton or John Locke, for they betrayed in their ideas the same deathly obsession with intricate details and spiritually void theories about how best to accumulate wealth or create towering architectures of self-absorption.

You know what? he was right. People are like this to this day, and you can't really bring about real advancement in poverty or human rights because even innocent people are are complicit in the true obstacle to this: which is the tendency to follow internal logics to their ends, setting in motion huge waves of societal forces with no vision or imagination. It's not at all evil... to call it evil is to be mentally fucked... but it is sad, because it appears that we (humanity) is not constituted to be able to step back and look with vision upon life as it is and then do the right thing -- forgive, forgive, and forgive some more.

But you also charge the poor Monks and Religious with being the causes of war, while you acquit and flatter the Alexanders and Caesars, the Louises and Fredericks, who alone are its causes and its actors. But the Religion of Jesus, Forgiveness of Sin, can never be the cause of a war, nor of a single martyrdom.

Those who martyr others, or who cause war, are Deists, but never can be Forgivers of Sin. The glory of Christianity is to conquer by Forgiveness. All the destruction, therefore, in Christian Europe has arisen from Deism, which is Natural Religion.

i trust that my prior explanations will make this final paragraph unnessary to explain anymore. You ought to be able to see what its saying without much difficulty.

[kmc]

If neither of you have read "The Stranger from Paradise" or "Fearful Symmetry", I highly recommend both. Fearful Symmetry is tougher to find, but those two books are the best studies of Blake's persona that I've run across.

[Rit]

Fearful Symmetry, Ken?!

i practically breathed that book for the past year. It's contributed to a lot of meself.

it brought an avalanche of ideas tumbling square onto my head all at once, which is one reason why i often sounded laboured and obtuse the past year when i tried to get all inner-leckshual... I've been trying ever since to sort it out into a more integrated and less, um.. sophomoric.. whole. (for myself, i mean, since it was all too much at once)

the author, Northrop Frye was a professor at my school until he died. Everytime i used to walk by the building named after him, i'd get all sentimental and shite (and i'm only half kidding here)

I continued to read Frye's other books, on The Educated Imagination, and Double Vision.

in short, Ken, Frye is da man. the best introduction to mature religious thought i've ever seen. And he was no mere theist.

[Rit]

i've seen The Stranger from Paradise around, but i haven't read it. I did read Erdman's Prophet Against Empire and Harold Bloom's Blake's Apocalypse.

[Mary]

Knowing absolutely nothing - and I mean nothing - about Blake, I just have to observe that "deist" was one of the most overused and ultimately vacuous terms of derision in that period. Kind of like "fascist" today - soooo many people were accused of deism for expressing any religious views that seemed remotely heterodox, that the word itself lost any real meaning outside of its function as a slur. ("socinian" served pretty much the same purpose back in 17th and 18th century religious thought, but unlike deist, that term is all but dead and forgotten today...)

that's neither here nor there as far as blake is concerned, i'm sure... just a pet peeve I couldn't resist venting!!! carry on...

Cheers,
M

[kmc]

socinian...now THAT is a great term.

I'll abstain from this discussion, though all this Lit stuff is certainly my cup of tea. One last admonition: to definitely pigeon-whole Satan from Paradise Lost as anything, be it hero or minor player, is dangerous to say the least. Fields of thought (not to mention many a doctorate dissertation) have been conjured from arguing for or against Satan's role in Paradise Lost. The magnitude of his role is open to best debate.

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

kmc said:

socinian...now THAT is a great term.

I'll abstain from this discussion, though all this Lit stuff is certainly my cup of tea. One last admonition: to definitely pigeon-whole Satan from Paradise Lost as anything, be it hero or minor player, is dangerous to say the least. Fields of thought (not to mention many a doctorate dissertation) have been conjured from arguing for or against Satan's role in Paradise Lost. The magnitude of his role is open to best debate.

Exactly. You're on my frequency there.

[kmc]

Did I say pigeon whole? I meant pigeon-hole. Where's my brain?

[Nepenthe]

Also Deists did not believe that God could be revealed to man, that God wasn't present in the lives of people. That man could not receive any instruction or revelations concerning everyday life, visions, the future, ect. Some of them also denied the virgin birth. They claimed that the New Testament taught that God took Mary, whom was engaged to Joseph, in adultery. They must have been interpreting the immaculate conception to mean God came down and had sex with her. Thomas Paine actually mentions this in his "Age of Reason".
Also many people believed that in Paradise Lost this was indeed the sin that took place. Satan beguiled/seduced Eve who was married to Adam and took her in adultery. This has been depicted in artwork. So therefore, they compared the two stories and felt this was a big contradiction!! From what I have read Paine and Blake were friends, I assume they agreed to disagree on many scriptural points and Paine's deism. Thomas Paine came from a Quaker family, but he didn't agree with their doctrines, and by this time Quakers had even corrupted the original form of the faith. Quakerism was always a very liberal faith that promoted the inner light, God is present in everyone's heart. But, like many other protestant sects became very strict in the sense of rejecting art, secular music, drinking, or any type of earthly pleasure. Paine also wrote about this. He called them the most deist of all because of their blandness. Also they became pacifists, which George Fox was not. George Fox wrote a letter to the king telling him he should defend his territories against the Turks, and he fully supported the military. He only stated that his call was not to join the military but to preach, and he believed war should be a last resort.

In the meantime you had the Calvinists, whom Milton took up their cause. This group is what spawned the Puritans and they were very 'elitist', they believed that they were the elect and everyone else was damned to hell, especially poor people. Snobs that looked down on people that didn't suit their fancy. This is why I suggested that Blake wrote that Milton was of the party of the Devil and didn't know it. The Calvinist/Puritans were assholes when they had some power, they accused people of witchcraft and executed them, just like the Catholics did.

Also Blake was all for the revolution in France until the terror broke out afterward. He became disillusioned by it because of 1. the violence/reign of terror once the monarchy fell and 2. the abolishment of all the churches and the set up of the Cult of the Supreme Being.

In his work Jerusalem (where that piece about the Deists came from) Blake addresses many group, the Jews, the Christians, the Deists ect.. That is where the Poem Jerusalem came from, along with the other things I posted. This is why I do not believe your interpretation Rit. The entire work is basically Blake's personal thoughts that even reflect some of his personal letters. He did believe in the scattering of the 10 tribes throughout Europe and then into America. He did believe that Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, and the apostles travelled to England, converted the Druids, and started an early form of Christianity. Joseph was a tin trader, along with many other in Palestine. Cornwall is indeed an ancient tin mining town. His painting of Joseph of Arimathea on the rocks of Albion is proof of this.

[Thorngrub]

kmc said:

Did I say pigeon whole? I meant pigeon-hole. Where's my brain?

I believe its subcontracted to Satan?

[Nepenthe]

Also, this has nothing to do with Blake, but there are legends that Jesus traveled to India and other lands between the ages of 12 and 30 teaching. According to the Bible they indeed traveled into Egypt when Jesus was a baby.

[phil]

Peace of cake when you can walk on water and fly through the air ... !!