William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art WorkLangridge, Irene
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William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work
Langridge, Irene
Blake, William, 1757-1827
"The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy; holiness
is not the price of entrance into heaven. Those who are cast out are all
those who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have
spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's by the various
arts of poverty, and cruelty of all kinds. The modern Church crucifies
Christ with the head downwards." And again, "Many persons, such as Paine
and Voltaire, with some of the ancient Greeks, say: "We will not converse
concerning good and evil, we will live in Paradise and Liberty! You may do
so in spirit, but not in the mortal body, as you pretend, till after the
Last Judgment. For in Paradise they have no corporeal and mortal body:
_that_ originated with the Fall and was called Death, and cannot be
removed but by a Last Judgment. While we are in the world of mortality, we
must suffer--the whole Creation groans to be delivered....
"Forgiveness of sin is only at the judgment-seat of Jesus the Saviour,
where the accuser is cast out, not because he sins, but because he
torments the just, and makes them do what he condemns as sin, and what he
knows is opposite to their own identity."
And now I must gather together all the frayed ends of this diffuse but
necessary chapter, and put the vital points, around which the seeming
incongruities and strangenesses of Blake's assertions arrange themselves,
into a symmetrical if not an organic whole. The oneness of the Eternal
Imagination, "Universal Poetic Genius," or God the Spirit, was the golden
background to Blake's vision of life. And on this unity he saw contrasted
the endless diversity of the spirit's expression in phenomena. All error
(not sin, which he did not believe to exist) came from the fall of the
spirit (through Urizen the creator) into division and the sexual and
generative life of man. This tended to a closing up of man into separate
selfhoods, and each selfhood, in its effort to preserve its corporeal
existence and separate character, was guilty of error, and gradually the
inlets through which communication with the Universal Spirit was
maintained became closed up, and were senses only available, in most men,
for the uses of the natural world. This condition leads to spiritual
negation, but is merely temporary, for when the body is destroyed at
death, which is the Last Judgement, Urizen's power is broken, and the
soul, however attenuated (as long as not altogether atrophied), returns to
its pristine union with the Universal Spirit, and, though completely
merged in it, yet in some wonderful way it preserves its own identity, or
essential quality, while the body, which is error, is "burnt up." But even
in the prison of the bodily life Humanity may be delivered from the
cramping and negative effect of the selfhood, through Jesus Christ, who
exists as the Human Divine in every heart, and who at the voice of the
Universal Spirit rises from the grave of selfhood, and draws the Christian
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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