William Blake's
“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is intellectual dynamite. Here
Blake is at his most paradoxical, anarchistic, and defiant. One of the main
points is summed up in the last line of the work: “One law for the
lion and ox is oppression.” This rejection of dogma and coercion
functions both on the level of form and content. This does not mean
that the “The Marriage” has no coherence or order. On the
contrary, it is knit together by related ideas and motifs, and the
combination of disparate elements (poems, proverbs, fancies,
demonstrations) provides a kind of order. Blake rejects as
tyrannical the philosophical empiricism of the Enlightenment, which
is related to an exaltation of Necessity – perhaps most succinctly
state by Pope: “Whatever is, is right.” Blake rejected this both
metaphysically and politically. Unlike the political radicals of
France who dethroned the Virgin and replaced her with the goddess
Reason, for Blake political liberation from the dominance of church
and state can only occur through a revolution of the mind or spirit.
We must change the way we perceive the world. The irreducible joy
and frustration that come from reading “The Marriage” lie partly
in the demolishing of strict categories and the challenging of
certainties. His unique vision is multivalent and willfully
contradictory, and when we take him seriously, instead of simply
telling ourselves that he's crazy, we too have to look into that void
that terrified the angel – something we mostly try to avoid.
It would be
interesting to look at how contraries of order/disorder formally
structure the work, but I'm going to focus on some of the ideas and
explore a few examples of Blake's truth-in-contradiction. The
“marriage” of Heaven and Hell results from the recognition of
their contrariness, for “opposition is true friendship.” He
distinguishes Energy and Reason as one of the pairs of contraries
without which “there is no progression.” However, “the voice
of the Devil” affirms that “Energy is the only life.” Blake
also rejects the opposition between body and soul, not because the
soul is produced by the body, but because the body is the limitation
of the soul. That is, soul is the prior reality. The body is like a
cave through which the soul sees. “The chinks in the cavern” are
the five senses which are “chief inlets of the soul in this age.”
This is not just a poetical conceit for Blake, but he indeed believed
that the soul exists independently of the body and the body is a kind of
“incrustation” on the soul. As he says in “A Vision of the
Last Judgment,” “I look through [the eye] and not with it.” He goes
on to compare the eye to a window, saying that he does not question
his "corporeal eye" any more than he would question a
window about a sight. Similarly, in “Marriage” he refers to “the doors of
perception” which must be cleansed for the world to appear
infinite. The senses are merely doorways which limit the vision of
the soul. My point with this discussion is to show that Blake
contradicts his own affirmation of contradiction. He proposes to
show the contraries underlying experience, but also destabilizes the
basis of these very contraries. His dualism becomes monism when he
chooses. Indeed, any “systematic reasoning” would undermine the
very purpose of “Marriage,” which affirms unsystematic
“exuberance” (and even does so with mockingly “systematic”
methods like arguments and lists).
For Blake, the
overthrowing of the tyranny of limited sensory experience is
inseparable from the overthrow of a tyrannous political regime. This
makes both political conservatives and rationalists/empiricists
uncomfortable. However, Blake's spiritual beliefs also make the
conventionally religious uneasy. In what we might call Blake's
theology we find another instance of contradiction and paradox that
recur through “Marriage.” A major fear of the early Church
Fathers was pantheism – of which they accused the pagans –
because it abolished the distinction between human and God. If God
is inseparable from his creation, the incarnation loses its meaning
of reconciling God and man. Blake seems to be rejecting this
distinction between human and divine. He states that “all deities
reside in the human breast” and that “God only acts and is in
existing beings or men.” Again, he says that “there is no other
God” than “great men.” He calls Jesus “the greatest man,”
diminishing Jesus's divinity. However, Blake also describes “Jehovah”
as “he who dwells in burning fire” – indicating that he is “the
God of inspiration and mercy” (A Blake Dictionary, Damon
206). Although Jesus is the greatest of men, after his death “he
became Jehovah.” So Blake emphasizes at once Jesus's humanity and
divinity, and he simultaneously obliterates the distinction between
God and man and discusses God as a distinct being. These paradoxes,
after all, are essential to Christianity, which in its beginning
defiantly intended to insult reason and philosophy. (Blake used the
paradoxical formulation of Athanasius in “There Is No Natural
Religion”: “God becomes as we are that we may be as he is.”)
Blake's “Marriage
of Heaven and Hell” challenges our prejudices, the ways we
make sense of the world. His vision is sufficiently (and
masterfully) contradictory (even contradicting his own
contradictions) so that he threatens and upsets just about everyone.
He questions the reality of a stable empirical world existing apart
from our perceptions (“Where man is not nature is barren”).
Instead, he suggests that our own beliefs – our own mind – deeply
affect the reality we perceive: “A fool sees not the same tree that
a wise man sees.” If the angel, whose head is full of Aristotle's
Analytics, sees devils, monsters, and spiders in the void, for Blake
the vision dissolves, as he finds himself on a riverbank in the
moonlight listening to a singer whose theme is, “The man who never
alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the
mind.” In “Marriage” no single truth reigns, but rather
multiple truths coexist. Once Blake has thrown out Aristotle's law
of non-contradiction, the world becomes a less certain place but
perhaps a more wondrous place: “Every thing possible to be believ'd
is an image of truth.”
Dimitri: I see why Prof. Elkins liked your writing so much. Blake reminds me of the following quotation from Jung (I used it in my term paper for her class, on TITN's Dick Diver): "The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing. . . . He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. . . . The only meaningful life [is] a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own peculiar law. . . . To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his own being . . . he has failed to
ReplyDeleterealize his life’s meaning."
Also, I think that the Beatniks of the 1950's should have been called Blakenits.
Dimitri,
ReplyDeleteYour post helped deepen my understanding of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Your insightful analysis of the hellish proverb “Where man is not nature is barren” and its connection to the questioning of a stable reality apart from our sense was wonderfully articulated. Thank you.