William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work — John Shaqi
William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art WorkLangridge, Irene
General
William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work
Langridge, Irene
Blake, William, 1757-1827
From the study of Blake's writings the following points--and they are
important to our future understanding of his art-work--stand out clearly
defined. He believed in a great permeating unconditioned spirit--God--of
whose nature men also partake, but subjected to the conditions and moral
nature which result from sexual and generative humanity. And beside the
unnameable supreme God there is another God, the creator Urizen, who is a
sort of divine demon. He it is who has divided humanity into sexes, and
inclosed the universal soul in separate bodies, and set up a code of
morals which bears no relation to the supreme God, Who being altogether
removed from, and above, the generative nature of man, does not Himself
conform to "laws of restriction and forbidding."
Urizen, who imprisons and torments conditioned humanity, is somehow
subduable by this same humanity of his own invention, and Christ, the
perfect man filled as full as may be with the Divine Spirit (for "a cup
may not contain more than its capaciousness"), rises in the hearts of
humanity, and effects its freedom, by aspiring past the Creator, to the
Altogether Divine, and uniting with it.
Jehovah addressing Christ, as the highest type and flower of humanity,
says to him, in the poem called the "Everlasting Gospel":
If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me.
Thou art a man: God is no more:
Thine own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my spirit of life.
This makes us think of Blake's follower, Walt Whitman, who in the same
sort of turgid and chaotic poetry in which Blake wrote the prophetic
books, but with no mystic clouds to shroud the meaning, has consistently
developed this thought: "One's self I sing, a simple separate person," and
"none has begun to think how divine he himself is," etc.
In Blake's conversations with Crabb Robinson, this mystic view of Christ
is very apparent. "On my asking," writes Mr. Robinson, "in what light he
viewed the great questions of the duty of Jesus," he said, "He is the only
God. But then," he added, "and so am I, and so are you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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