Chapter II. - Major Influences
The Romantic period
As a term to cover
the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the
18th century and the first decades of the 19th, "Romantic"
is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled
"Romantic movement" at the time, and the great writers of
the period did not call themselves Romantics.
Blake lived during
a time of intense social change. The American Revolution, the French
Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution all happened during his
lifetime. These changes gave Blake a chance to see one of the most
dramatic stages in the transformation of the Western world from a
somewhat feudal, agricultural society to an industrial society where
philosophers and political thinkers such as John Locke (1632-1704) and Thomas Paine (1737-1809) championed
the rights of the individual. Some of these changes had Blake's approval;
others did not.
Many of the age's
foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world's
affairs, nevertheless. Blake's affirmation in 1793 that "A
new Heaven is begun..." was matched a generation later by Shelley's "The world's great age begins
anew." "These, these shall give the world/Another
heart, and other pulses" wrote Keats, referring
to Haydon Leigh Hunt and Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore:
in particular the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was
being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept
through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants
might soon end.
The feature most likely
to strike a reader turning to the poets of the time after reading
their immediate predecessors is the new role of individual feeling
and thought. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been
to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society,
addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his
end the conveyance of "truth," the Romantics found the source
of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake's marginal comment
on Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: "to
generalise is to be an idiot; to particularise is the alone distinction
of merit." The poet was seen as an individual distinguished
from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his
basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. The implied attitude
to an audience varied accordingly: although Wordsworth maintained that a poet did not write "for Poets alone, but
for Men," for Shelley the poet was "a nightingale
who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet
sounds," and Keats declared "I never wrote one
single line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought." (»1) Poetry was regarded
as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it
was to be judged. Provided the feeling behind it was genuine, the
resulting creation must be valuable.
The emphasis on feeling - seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Burns - was in some ways
a continuation of the earlier "cult of sensibility"; and
it is worth remembering that Pope praised his father as having known
no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to
receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions
of poetry. Wordsworth called it "the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feeling," and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined
"natural poetry" as "Feeling itself, employing
Thought only as the medium of its utterance." (»2)
It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity
of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached
to the lyric. The degree of intensity was affected by the extent to
which the poet's imagination had been at work; as Coleridge saw it, the imagination was the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine
creative force that made the poet a godlike being.
Romantic theory thus
differed from the neoclassic in the relative importance it allotted
to the imagination: Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry
as "invention, imagination and judgement" but William
Blake wrote: "One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination,
the Divine Vision." (»3)
The judgment, or conscious control, was felt to be secondary; the
poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings
of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural,
and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being
regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been
overlaid by the restrictions of civilized "reason." Rousseau's
sentimental conception of the "noble savage" was often invoked,
and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden's or
that the type was adumbrated in the "poor Indian" of Pope's Essay on Man (»4).
A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the
Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere,
intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates
of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, "You
feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its
shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that
actuates it." This organic view of poetry is opposed to
the classical theory of "genres," each with its own linguistic
decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable
except in short passages (»5).
Hand in hand with the
new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter
went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers,
particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the later
18th century stale and stilted, or "gaudy and inane," and
totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could
not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly
sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech.
His theories of diction have been allowed to loom too large in critical
discussion: his own best practice very often differs from his theory.
Nevertheless, when Wordsworth published his preface to Lyrical
Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible
diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely
conventional language and, with the notable exceptions of Blake and
Burns, little first-rate poetry had been produced (as distinct from
published) in Britain since the 1740s (»6).
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The Poets of Early-Romanticism
Useful as it is to
trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity
among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of
the first Romantics – William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
and William Wordsworth, for example – as if it had been written
primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change
the intellectual climate of the age. Blake had been dissatisfied since
boyhood with the current state of poetry and the drabness of contemporary
thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour
with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and
art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An
Island in the Moon (c. 1784-85); he then took the bolder
step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs
of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged
him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event.
Tradition has it that he openly wore the revolutionary red cockade
in the streets of London.
In his powerful works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal
cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary
thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were
not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise
his contemporaries' view of the universe and to construct a new mythology
centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen,
a figure of reason and law who he believed to be the true deity worshiped
by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen's rise to provide a fortification
against the chaos created by loss of a true human spirit was set out
first in "Prophetic Books" such as The
First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously,
in the unfinished manuscript Vala,
or The Four Zoas, written from
about 1796 to about 1807 (»7).
Later Blake shifted
his poetic aim once more. Instead of attempting a narrative epic on
the model of Paradise Lost he
produced the more loosely organized visionary narratives of Milton (1804-08) and Jerusalem (1804-20)
where, still using mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative
artist as the hero of society and forgiveness as the greatest human
virtue.
Blake's later poetry
was most probably influenced by the graveyard school. Among Blake's
secular illustrations were those for an edition of Thomas
Gray's poems and the 537 watercolours for Edward
Young's 'Night Thoughts'. The "graveyard" is a
genre of 18th-century British poetry that focused on death and bereavement.
The graveyard school consisted largely of imitations of Robert
Blair's popular long poem of morbid appeal, The
Grave (1743), and of Edward Young's celebrated blank-verse
dramatic rhapsody Night Thoughts (1742-45). These poems express the sorrow and pain of bereavement,
evoke the horror of death's physical manifestations, and suggest the
transitory nature of human life. The meditative, philosophical tendencies
of graveyard poetry found their fullest expression in Thomas Gray's "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard" (1751).
The poem is a dignified, gently melancholy elegy celebrating the graves
of humble and unknown villagers and suggesting that the lives of rich
and poor alike "lead but to the grave." The works of the
graveyard school were significant as early precursors of the Romantic
Movement.
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Mysticism and Romanticism
The 18th century –
and especially the second half – is a very important age from
an esoteric point of view. The new scientific view of the world demolished
the theory of macrocosm and microcosm, and the whole edifice of magic
which had been built on it. The universe was no longer constructed
on the model of a man, alive and all trough, pulsing with currents
of divine energy, responsive to human will and desire. Man could not
now climb the ladder of his own nature to scale the heights of power.
He did not contain the heavens himself, so that he was influenced
by the stars and could dominate them in turn. The links of sympathy
and correspondence, which the magician sought to employ, were consigned
to the rubbish heap of discarded theories. The spirits of things which
made them worth mastering, and indeed it became questionable whether
they existed at all. Predicting the future changed into a scientific
instead of a religious, magical or psychic exercise.
William Blake
– Newton
(Newton designing the new universe)
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The universe was now
a dead piece of machinery, it cogs and wheels turning in accordance
with immutable laws which left no scope for magical and mystical
manipulation and little for effective religion. People began
to look instead to improved technology for control of the environment.
A certain respect remained for religion, though it proved hollow,
magic ceased to command respect or cause much alarm in intellectual
circles. It was dismissed with contempt as irrational and ridiculous.
At popular levels, improved agricultural and medical techniques
weakened – without entirely destroying – the hold
of magic, witchcraft, herb-lore and astrology on the most important
areas of most people's lives. The rationalism of the Enlightenment
cut the arteries of folk customs and ceremonies, which began
to die out. These trends were far more pronounced in Protestant
quarters than in Roman Catholic ones, where the old religion
and the old traditions fared better. The reaction, when it came,
was correspondingly stronger in Protestant than in Catholic
spheres of influence.
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As a counter-reaction
of the new scientific dogmas there is a growing interest in the esoteric
teachings everywhere in Europe from the late 1700s. There's a kind
of “renaissance of the esoteric” and many works of former
esoteric and classical hermetic writers are widely published. These
include the thoughts of the neoplatonist Marsiglio Ficino (1433-1499),
Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Gemistos Plethon, Raimondus Lullus,
Cusanus and cardinal Bessarion, the writings of the alchemists Paracelsus
(1493-1541) and Bombast von Hohenheim (1493-1541), the occultists
Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), Agrippa Von Nettesheim (Heinrich Cornelius
1486-1535) and Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), and the works of Nostradamus
(Michel de Nostredame 1503-1566). The famous English magicians John
Dee (-1608) and Edward Kelly (-1595) are published again as well as
the astrologers Regiomontanus (Johann Müller 1436-76), Jerome
Cardan (1501-76), and Copernicus (-1543). But the thoughts of the
theosophical Sebastian Franck (1499-1553), Valentin Weigel (1533-1588),
or Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) are even more influential, as well
as the ideas of the great Renaissance natural philosophers like Giordano
Bruno (1548-1600), Galileo Galilei (1564-1641) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
Protestant mystical
circles, neoplatonist groupings, freemason lodges and magical societies
pop up like mushrooms after a heavy rain and good sunshine. There's
no end to the number of mystic groups and self-made magicians proclaiming
some kind of superior mystic knowledge. England is especially intricate.
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Protestant mysticism
The chief representatives
of Protestant mysticism are the continental "Spirituals,"
among whom Sebastian Franck (c.1499-c.1542), Valentin Weigel (1533-88),
and Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) are especially noteworthy. Among
traditional Lutherans Johann Arndt (1555-1621) in his Four Books on
True Christianity took up many of the themes of medieval mysticism
in the context of Reformation theology and prepared the way for the
spiritual revival known as Pietism, within which such mystics as Count
von Zinzendorf flourished. In England the Anglican divines known as
the "Cambridge Platonists", the "Quakers" headed
by George Fox (1624-91) and William Law (1686-1761) were important.
In Holland a mystical group known as "Collegiants", similar
to the Quakers, broke away from the Remonstrant (Calvinist) Church.
Other mystical bodies were the "Schwenckfeldians", founded
by Kaspar Schwenckfeld, and the "Family of Love", founded
in Holland by Hendrik Niclaes early in the 16th century before moving
to England about 1550. The religion of the "Ranters" and
other radical Puritans in 17th-century England had mystical aspects
(»8).
The cardinal feature
of Protestant mysticism is the emphasis laid on the divine element
in humanity variously known as the "spark" or "ground"
of the soul, the "divine image" or "holy self,"
the "Inner Light," or the "Christ within." This
was one of the essential elements of 'Rhineland mysticism' and shows
the connection between medieval and Reformation mysticism. For Böhme
and the Spirituals, essential reality lies in the ideal world, which
Böhme described as "the uncreated Heaven." Böhme
took over the Gnostic belief that the physical world arose from a
primeval fall, renewed with the Fall of Adam. His teaching was the
main formative influence on the developed outlook of William Law and
William Blake.
For Protestant as well as for Roman Catholic mystics, sin is essentially
the assertion of the self in its separation from God. The divine life
is embodied in "the true holy self that lies within the other"
[Böhme, First Epistle]. When that self is manifested, there is
a birth of God (or of Christ) in the soul. Protestant mystics rejected
the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine of the total corruption of human
nature. William Law remarked: "the eternal Word of God lies hid
in thee, as a spark of the divine nature" [The Spirit of Prayer,
I.2.]. "The eternal Word of God" is the inner Christ, incarnate
whenever people rise into union with God. By the Spirituals Christ
was viewed as the ideal humanity born in God from all eternity. This
conception received its greatest emphasis with Kaspar Schwenckfeld,
who, unlike Protestant mystics generally, taught that humans as created
beings are totally corrupt; salvation means deliverance from the creaturely
nature and union with the heavenly Christ (»9).
Protestant mystics
explicitly recognize that the divine Light or Spark is a universal
principle. Hans Denck in the early 16th century spoke of the witness
of the Spirit in "heathens and Jews." Sebastian Franck,
like the Cambridge Platonists, found divine revelation in the work
of the sages of Greece and Rome. George Fox appealed to the conscience
of the American Indians as a proof of the universality of the Inner
Light. William Law described non-Christian saints as "apostles
of a Christ within." Protestant mystics stated plainly that,
for the mystic, supreme authority lies of necessity not in the written
word of Scripture but in the Word of God in the self. Fox said: "I
saw, in that Light and Spirit that was before the Scriptures were
given forth" [Journal, chapter 2]. It was especially on this
ground that the mystics came into conflict with the established church,
whether Roman Catholic or Protestant (»10).
The "Ranters"
provide a good example of the conflict between mysticism and established
religion. They held, with Fox and Hendrik
Niclaes, that perfection is possible in this life. Puritan
leaders under the Commonwealth denounced them for their "blasphemous
and execrable opinions," and there was, no doubt, an antinomian
tendency among them that rejected the principle of moral law. Some
rejected the very notion of sin and believed in the universal restoration
of all things in God.
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Political radicalism
The degree to which Blake was personally acquainted with the leading radicals of his days,
such as Godwin, Holcroft, and Thomas
Paine, has been exaggerated (»11),
but there is no question that he sympathised with their ideas, since
these are clearly reflected in the two works which follow the Songs
of Innocence and Thel: The French revolution and the Marriage of Heaven
and Hell. The former Blake planned to print and publish in the ordinary
way, through the well-known radical bookseller Joseph Johnson, and
not by his method of illuminated painting. Although, it never appeared
and is known only from a proof copy, it is of importance in setting
forth the story of the first years of the French Revolution in a manner
which shows clearly that Blake was at this date a convinced Jacobin
(»12).
Throughout his works
William Blake makes such claims as "There is no natural religion."
and "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" ["Jerusalem"
Pl. 52]. Presumably he saw deism as a very dangerous tyrannical movement.
Yet, when Bishop Watson wrote a refutation of Thomas Paine's The Age
of Reason, Blake angrily annotated the refutation, proclaiming Watson's
motives to be tyrannical and Paine to be a "worker of miracles".
Most studies on the subject tend to locate the reason for Blake's
extravagant praise of Paine in his sympathies with revolutionary politics.
It does not matter that Blake and Paine apparently cannot reconcile
their religious differences, because Blake recognized that Paine and
he were attacking the same tyrannous regimes. However, Blake had much
better reason – involving his very particular use of the terms
"natural religion" and "prophecy" – for
praising Paine as a miracle-worker.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
was an English-American writer and political pamphleteer whose "Common
Sense" and "Crisis" papers were important influences
on the American Revolution. Other works that contributed to his reputation
as one of the greatest political propagandists in history were Rights
of Man, a defence of the French Revolution and of republican principles;
and The Age of Reason, an exposition of the place of religion in society.
The millenialist rhetoric
of the Protestant dissenting faiths and Great Awakening promotion
of "inner light" theology helped to fuel political resistance
to bring about a new way of life for those who were not benefiting
from the current system. Moreover, millenialism provided an explanation
for the tumultuous revolutionary uprisings going on in the world in
the 1790s, uprisings which threatened the status quo. A positive explanation
of revolutionary movements would have been welcome to members of working
classes, who were drawn to evangelical religious groups, simply for
economic reasons. Evangelical egalitarian rhetoric offered these struggling
people a voice in a social system that was unresponsive to their needs.
It was only a short step from religious conversion to radical political
activism, and many millenarians joined the radical secular groups
which commonly attracted a motley group of "the insecure and
declining, the casualised, pauperised and criminalised" artisans
and laborers of middle and low classes whose troubles Paine would
well have known.
Indeed, as J.
F.C. Harrison has observed, Paine's writings, including The
Age of Reason attracted these politically concerned, millenarian
Christians, who saw Paine as instrumental in ushering in a new age.
These evangelical millenialists were actually drawn to such deist
expressions in Paine's work as "My own mind is my own church,"
as apt articulations of their own dissenting faiths, which emphasized
individual spiritual guidance [Paine I: 464]. Harrison suggests that
at the popular level, at least, Paine's deism was incorporated into
religious beliefs. It would be just as easy to call Paine a millenialist,
simply based on his popular reception as such, as it has been for
us classify him as a deist (»13).
Paine's attack on Christianity
in The Age of Reason claims that the Bible is inapplicable to the
eighteenth century. Really, according to Paine, it was written by
poets and prophets who "were in parties, and they prophesied
for or against, according to the party they were with, as the poetical
and political writers of the present day write in defence of the party
they associate with against the other." [Paine I:562]. From what
we know of the importance Blake places on revelation, we can expect
that this passage would have angered Blake, who was so concerned with
his role as both poet and prophet.
However, what may be less clear is that Paine advocates a particular
kind of deism that shares the tenets of the popular "inner light"
philosophy in a way that very likely interested Blake. Paine, whose
father was a Quaker, shared with other deists like Voltaire a respect
for Quakerism as "the religion that approaches the nearest of
all others to true Deism, in the moral and benign part thereof"
[Paine, Age of Reason I: 498]. However, Paine goes further than his
fellow deists when he calls for the Quakers to promote their religious
beliefs in support of the colonial cause in 1776. Paine's "Epistle
to Quakers", which Blake might have read as part of the Appendix
to the third edition of Common Sense , was written in response to
a Tory movement among colonial Quakers. Paine accuses this movement
of hypocrisy.
These writings reveal that, more than simply respecting this branch
of inner light theology, Paine saw the Quaker cause as allied closely
with his own. In instructing those who shared the faith of his father
on how to best apply their religious beliefs as a force for good,
Paine gives them a non-military mode of opposition similar to his
own: the Quakers must publish to spread their ideals and convince
those who are tyrannically acting in the name of God that they must
change their ways. Paine thus calls for mental warfare for inner light
principles of human equality which are closer to popular millenialist
ideals than to a deism that supports the status quo by proclaiming
a God afar off whose machine is set to run perfectly in his absence.
This, in short, is a call to do the work of God to bring about a better
world.
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Neoplatonism
The "Cambridge
Platonists" hoped to reconcile Christian ethics with
Renaissance humanism, religion with the new science, and faith with
rationality. Their leader was Benjamin Whichcote, who expounded in
his sermons the Christian humanism that united the group. His principal
disciples at the University of Cambridge were Ralph Cudworth, Henry
More, and John Smith; Joseph Glanvill was a University of Oxford convert.
Nathanael Culverwel, Richard Cumberland, and the mystic Peter Sterry
at Cambridge and John Norris at Oxford were influenced by Cambridge
Platonism without wholly accepting its moral and religious ideals.
Educated as Puritans,
the Cambridge Platonists reacted against the Calvinist emphasis on
the arbitrariness of divine sovereignty. In their eyes, Thomas Hobbes,
the political philosopher, and the Calvinists both erred in supposing
that morality consists in obedience to a will. Morality, the Platonists
said, is essentially rational; and the good man's love of goodness
is at the same time an understanding of its nature, which not even
God can alter through sovereign power. Against both William Laud,
archbishop of Canterbury, and the Calvinists, they denied that ritual,
church government, or detailed dogmas are essentials of Christianity.
To be a Christian is to participate in divine wisdom and to be free
to choose whatever forms of religious organization prove helpful.
The width of their tolerance won them the nickname "latitude
men"; and they were often condemned as Unitarians or atheists
because they stressed morality so far above dogma.
Their metaphysics derives
from Renaissance Platonism, which interpreted Plato in a Neoplatonic
light. They learned much from Descartes's critique of Empiricism;
but, fearing that the new "mechanical" theories might undermine
the religious world view, they supported (against Descartes) a teleological
interpretation of natural processes (»14).
The influence of "Christian
Platonism" on English literature, and especially on English poetry,
has been wide and deep. But there has also been a strongly anti-Christian
Neoplatonic influence, that of Thomas Taylor "the Platonist"
(1758-1835), who published translations of Plato, Aristotle, and a
large number of Neoplatonic works in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries. Taylor was as militant in his pagan Platonism as was Gemistus
Plethon. His ideas had a strong influence on the English Romantics.
In the poetry of William Blake – who eventually succeeded in
reconciling Taylor's paganism with his own very original version of
Christianity – much of the symbolism is Neoplatonic. The Platonism
of the English Romantic poets Coleridge and Shelley also derives from
Taylor, although both were able to read the original texts. Taylor
also deeply influenced Emerson and his circle in America. Later, in
the early 20th century, the influence of Taylor's writings was again
apparent in the Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats, who
in his later poems made use of Stephen MacKenna's then new translation
of Plotinus (»15).
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Freemasonry and Secret Societies
Freemasonry also becomes
a major organizing factor of the modern age, due to the activity of
the legendary Cagliostro (1743-95) and Saint Germain (-1784). The
first freemason lodge is founded in London in 1717, but then it quickly
spreads to the continent and America. Important freemasons - from
a philosophical point of view - of the time are Sincerus Renatus (Sigmund
Richter 1710), and Jacobite Scots (1750’). This is the time
when William Stukeley (1687-1765) lays the foundations of the modern
"Druid Society". Stukeley became a Mason because he hoped
that the Craft's secret concealed 'the remains of the mysteries of
the ancients'. Stukeley was a clergyman, physician and archaeologist,
a Fellow of the Royal Society and the founder of the "Royal Society
of Antiquaries". He was also a member of the "Egyptian Society",
founded in 1741 to promote the antique wisdom of the Nile. He investigated
Stonehenge and Avenbury, and published books on the two sites as 'temples
of the British Druids' in the 1740s. He laid out a Druid shrine round
an old apple tree in his garden in Linconshire and his friends, with
affectionate amusement, called him "the Arch-Druid of his Age"
(»16).
Stukeley was dismayed
by the atheism of his time and, in the Renaissance spirit, hoped to
re-establish the authority of Christianity by tracing its essence
back to the earliest times. In a book published in 1736 he carried
his efforts to the remarkable length of identifying the Roman Bacchus
with God the Father. In Druidism he found 'the aboriginal patriarchal
religion', the pure and ancient knowledge of God which the Druids,
he thought, had brought with them from among the Hebrews when they
left Palestine for Britain about the time of Abraham. Stukeley's ideas
seem to have had a great impact on Blake's own mythology (»17).
This is the age when
"The Golden Rosy Cross Brotherhood" is formed, which has
amongst its members for example William II., the Prussian king (1786-97),
but this is the revival of the "Order of the Templarian Knights"
too, which can be traced back to the German freemason lodge called
“Strict Observance”, and was founded by Baron von Hund
(1755). This is when the French magician, Martinez de Pasqually (1727-79)
founds the "Ordere des Chevalier-Macons, Elus Cohens de l’Universe",
with students like Louis Claude de St-Martin (1743-1803). Other important
figures of the age are Jean Baptiste Willermoz (1767), who founded
"The Order of Black Eagle Rosy Cross", Giacomo Casanova
(1725-98), and Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who founded mesmerism.
The most important esoteric thinker of the time is Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688-1772), whose writings had greatly influenced Blake, especially
with his work “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. William
Blake (1757-1827), with his unique form of illuminated poetry inspired
by mystical vision, also greatly constitutes to the mystical philosophy
and tradition of the age. [See below: The New Church]
Alchemy was conducted in hidden societies. There was a sensation in England
in 1782, when a Fellow of the Royal Society, James Price, turned mercury
into gold in the presence of distinguished observers. But the feat
turned out to have been fraudulent and the unfortunate Price committed
suicide. Astrology though less popular is kept alive in a rudimentary
form in the almanacs. The most poular of them was Vox Stellarum, which
was put out under the name of the Astrologer Francis Moore long after his death in 1715. It sold over 100.000 copies in 1768
and subsequently became the well-known Old
Moore's Almanac, which is still published. But less than
a half a dozen new astrological textbooks were published between 1700
and 1780. (»18)
Another ingredient
in the magical, mystical melting-pot was the perennial glamour of
Egyptian wisdom. The hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered, and
would not be till the 1820s. They were still believed to be charged
with esoteric and compelling wisdom. Mozart was a
mason and The Magic Flute (1791)
is set in ancient Egypt and identifies the mysteries of Masonry with
those of Isis and Osiris as the pathway to salvation. By this time
the Sicilian adventurer Giuseppe Balsamo (1743-95),
who called himself Count Cagliostro, had founded his "Egyptian
Rite of Masonry", with himself at its head as Grand Copht and
his beautiful wife presiding over the women's lodges as the Queen
of Sheba.
Egyptology and Orientalism directed the general interest
towards ‘ancient’ wisdom and the mystical teachings. Some
more important figures of this age were the English magician, Francis
Barrett (1801), the astrologer Robert Cross Smith (1795-1832) and Richard James Morrison (1795-1874),
who laid the foundations of today’s modern ‘lower’
astrology. But perhaps the most important figure was to be Eliphas
Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant 1810-?), who made the biggest
influence on his age (»19).
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The New Church
Probably the most
important 'movement' to have influence on William Blake's philosophy
and work was "The New Church". Also called Swedenborgians,
it refers to the churches founded by the followers of Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772), the 18th-century Swedish scientist,
philosopher, and theologian: the General Conference of the New Church,
the General Convention of the New Jerusalem in the U.S.A., and the
General Church of the New Jerusalem. Its members are followers of
the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. Soon after his death, devoted
followers created Swedenborgian societies dedicated to the study of
his thought. These societies formed the nucleus of the Church of the
New Jerusalem, or New Church, also referred to as the Swedenborgians.
Swedenborg did not himself found a church, but he believed that his
writings would be the basis of a "New Church," which he
related to the New Jerusalem mentioned in the biblical Book of Revelation.
Shortly after Swedenborg's death, a group of his followers in England
decided to establish a separate church. In 1788 the first building
for New Church worship was opened in Great East Cheap, London, and
was rapidly followed by others. In 1789 a conference met in the London
church, and, except for 1794-1806 and 1809-14, the General Conference
of the New Church has met annually. According to a number of researchers
William Blake was in very close contact with the Church
of the New Jerusalem (»20),
and some suggest, that he even tried to establish his own Swedenborgian
society (»21).
On April 7, 1744, Swedenborg
had his first vision of Christ, which gave him a temporary rest from
the temptations of his own pride and the evil spirits he believed
to be around him. A definite call to abandon worldly learning occurred
in April 1745, Swedenborg told his friends in his later years. The
call apparently came in the form of a waking vision of the Lord. Swedenborg
thereafter left his remaining works in the natural sciences unfinished.
For the remainder of his long career, Swedenborg devoted his enormous
energy to interpreting the Bible and to relating what he had seen
and heard in the world of spirits and angels.
From 1749 to 1771 he
wrote some 30 volumes, all of them in Latin and the major part anonymously.
Among these were Arcana Coelestia, 8 vol. (1749-56; Heavenly Arcana)
and Apocalypsis Explicata, 4 vol. (1785-89; Apocalypse Explained),
which contain his commentaries on the internal spiritual meaning of
Genesis and Exodus and on the Book of Revelation, respectively. De
Coelo et ejus Mirabilibus et de Inferno (1758; On Heaven and Its Wonders
and on Hell) is perhaps his best-known theological work. He gave an
admirably clear summary of his theological thinking in his last work,
the Vera Christiana Religio (1771; True Christian Religion), which
was written when he was 83. (»22)
Swedenborg asserted that his entry into the field of theological study
was in response to a divine vision and call; that his spiritual senses
were opened so that he might be in the spiritual world as consciously
as in the material world; and that the long series of exegetical and
theological works that he wrote constituted a revelation from God
for a new age of truth and reason in religion. Furthermore, he held
that this new revelation of God was what was meant by the Second Coming.
Because of his otherworldly experiences, Swedenborg has often been
regarded either as a spiritualist "medium" or as a mystic,
but in his dry, matter-of-fact accounts of the spiritual world and
in his acutely reasoned theology he actually retains his lifelong
attitude of the scientific and philosophic investigator.
Swedenborg consistently maintained that the infinite, indivisible
power and life within all creation is God. In his theology he asserts
the absolute unity of God in both essence (essentia) and being (esse).
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit represent a trinity of essential
qualities in God; love, wisdom, and activity. This divine trinity
is reproduced in human beings in the form of the trinity of soul,
body, and mind. Swedenborg accepted that all creation has its origin
in the divine love and wisdom and asserted that all created things
are forms and effects of specific aspects of that love and wisdom
and thus "correspond," on the material plane, to spiritual
realities. This true order of creation, however, has been disturbed
by man's misuse of his free will. He has diverted his love from God
to his own ego, and thus evil has come into the world.
In order to redeem and save mankind, the divine being of God had to
come into the world in the material, tangible form of a human being--i.e.,
Jesus Christ. Christ's soul partook of the divine being itself, but
in order that there might be an intimate contact of God with fallen
mankind, Jesus assumed from Mary a body and a human nature comprising
all the planes of human life. During the course of his life on earth,
Jesus resisted every possible temptation and lived to their divine
fullness the truths of the Word of God; in so doing he laid aside
all the human qualities he had received from Mary, and his nature
was revealed as the divine embodiment of the divine soul. Redemption,
for Swedenborg, consisted in mankind being re-created in God's image
through the vehicle of Christ's glorification. It was through the
example of Christ's victory over all temptation and all evil that
men could achieve a similar harmonious unification between their spiritual
and their material aspects. Swedenborg rejected the tripersonalism
of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (i.e., the one God revealed
in the Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). To him the Trinity
was in one Person, the Father being the originating divine being itself,
the Son the human embodiment of that divine soul, and the Holy Spirit
the outflowing activity of Jesus, or the "Divine Human."
Swedenborg also rejected
the orthodox conceptions of redemption. To him the redemption of mankind
represented a deliverance from the domination of evil. The hells,
which are the communities of the spirits of evil men in the spiritual
world, were aspiring to force themselves upon men's minds, destroying
their freedom to discern between truth and falsity and therefore between
good and evil. By admitting into himself the evil spirits' temptations
and by his complete resistance to them, Jesus broke their power; and
the inflowing of the divine being into the human plane thus perfected
interposed an eternal and infinitely powerful barrier between the
hells and mankind. Human beings are thus saved from the forcible imposition
of the hells upon themselves and are thus free to know and obey the
truth. Man's salvation depends on his acceptance of and response to
divine truth (»23).
In his massive exegetical
and theological volumes, Swedenborg attempted to interpret the Scriptures
in the light of the "correspondence" between the spiritual
and the material planes. He viewed references in the Bible to mundane
historical matters as symbolically communicated spiritual truths,
the key to which he tried to find through detailed and voluminous
commentaries and interpretations. Swedenborg died in London in 1772,
where he was buried in the Swedish Church. At the request of the Swedish
government, his body was removed to Uppsala cathedral in 1908.
Swedenborg never acted
as a preacher but rather relied totally on the effect of his huge
Latin volumes. His influence was by no means restricted to his immediate
disciples, to the extent that the first Swedenborgian societies appeared
in the 1780s, and the first independent congregation, the origin of
the various Church of the New Jerusalem organizations, was founded
in London in 1788 – only sixteen years after his death. His
visions and religious ideas have not only been a source of inspiration
for William Blake, but for a number of prominent writers, including
Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
William Butler Yeats, and August Strindberg (»24).
Top
Footnotes
(1) Quotations from Cantor, Paul A. - Creature and Creator: Myth-Making
and English Romanticism. [Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.]
(p. 22-28.)
(2) Bloom, Harold - The Visionary Company: A Reading
of English Romantic Poetry. [Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1971.]
(p. 24.)
(3) Cantor, Paul A. - Creature and Creator: Myth-Making
and English Romanticism. [Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.]
(p.45.)
(4) c.a. p.56.
(5) Bloom, Harold - The Visionary Company: A Reading
of English Romantic Poetry. [Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1971.]
(6) Encyclopaedia Britannica [1994-1998] - see: Romanticism
(7) Lindsay, Jack - William Blake: His Life and Work.
[London, Constable, 1978.] (p. 62.)
(8) Encyclopaedia Britannica [1994-1998] See: Protestant Christianity
(9) Erdman, David V. (ed.) - Blake and His Bibles.
[West Cornwall, Locust Hill Press, 1990.]
(10) Erdman, David V. (ed.) - Blake and His
Bibles. [West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1990.] (p. 113.)
(11) Erdman, David V. - Blake: Prophet against
Empire. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.] (p. 139-47.)
(12) Blunt, Anthony - The Art of William Blake.
[New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.] (Chpt. IV.)
(13) Elisa E. Beshero - "For every thing that
lives is Holy": The Millenialist Revolutionary Visions of William
Blake and Thomas Paine [Penn State University]
(14) Encyclopaedia Britannica [1994-1998] See: Cambridge Neoplatonists
(15) Harper, George Mills - The Neoplatonism of William
Blake. [Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1961.]
(16) Cavendish, Richard - A History of Magic. [Arkana,
1990.] (p. 125.)
(17) Fisher, F. Peter - Blake and the Druids. [in
Frye (ed.): Blake . Prentice-Hall, New Jersey 1966.]
(18) Cavendish, Richard - A History of Magic. [Arkana,
1990.] (p. 123.)
(19) Cavendish, Richard - A History of Magic. [Arkana,
1990.] (p. 122-132.)
(20) Paley, Morton D. - "A New Heaven Is Begun:
Blake and Swedenborgianism.". [in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly
13 (1979): 64-90.]
(21) Schuchard, Marsha Keith - "The Secret Masonic
History of Blake's Swedenborg Society". [in Blake: An Illustrated
Quarterly 26 (1992): 40-51.]
(22) J. Hyde - A Bibliography of the Works of Emanuel
Swedenborg. [1906.]
(23) "Swedenborg's Theology" in Encyclopaedia Britannica [1994-1998] See: Emanuel Swedenborg
(24) I. Jonsson - Emanuel Swedenborg. [Eng. trans.
1971.] (Introduction)
