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1. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: General Introduction

A prose work by W. Blake, etched c. 1790-73, introduced by a short poem. It consists of a sequence of paradoxical aphorisms in which Blake turns conventional morality on its head, claiming that man does not consist of the duality of Soul = Reason and Body = Evil, but that "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul...Energy is the only life, and is from the Body...Energy is Eternal Delight." He proceeds to claim that Milton's Satan was truly his Messiah, and that Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it", and to produce a series of "Proverbs of Hell" ("Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" being one of the most notorious), which also celebrate the holiness of the natural world. He then moves to a sequence of visionary encounters with angels and prophets, in the course of which he dismisses the writings of Swedenborg (whom he had greatly admired), accusing him of not having conversed sufficiently with Devils but only with Angels, and ends with an evocation of an Angel turned Devil. G. B. Shaw, who greatly admired Blake, was much influenced by his doctrine of contraries.

2. The Two Concepts for understanding The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Two concepts are key to understanding The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Blake’s idiosyncratic form of Christianity. First, as articulated in his classic Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), is the notion of “contraries,” or opposing forces, similar to the Daoist notion of yin and yang. Blake saw all life as a necessary interplay of opposites. “The Argument” of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell applies this notion of the contraries to orthodox Christian dogma: As Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy: “Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.”

For Blake any system, religious or philosophical, which tries to give preference to one half of such a dichotomy does not admit the complexity and unity of human experience and is destined to failure. Such failure leads to oppression and tyranny by the “elect” half of the dichotomy, which turns its opposite, to use Calvinist jargon, into the “reprobate.”

The second key concept springs from the first. In the personal mythology presented in his prophetic works, Blake satirizes the notion of the Old Testament Jehovah, as refracted through Enlightenment thought, as “Urizen” (often seen as homophone for “Your Reason”). Blake rejects the notion of God as a ruthless, rule-making punisher who is guided by an impersonal, stony rationalism. Blake excoriated the Christianity of his day, both Protestant and Catholic, as a form of primitive idol worship to this “Old Nobodaddy” with his rules and regulations, rewards and punishments. He considered the Church of England an arm of state tyranny, offering an ideological framework for un-Christian practices ranging from child labor to slavery.

Even more than the physical abuses of which the Church washed its hand, Blake deemed the mental enslavement of its believers as its ultimate corrupting influence.

For Blake, imagination, and not rationality or intellect, is the central faculty of mind that unites the human with the creativity of the divine. Blake identified this creative imagination with the notion of the Logos, or Word made Flesh, in the divine humanity of Jesus Christ. Several of the “Proverbs of Hell” reinforce the primacy of imagination and energy: “What is now prov’d, was once only imagined” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The first indicates that the creative act begins with an imaginative concept; the second suggests that wisdom is not a matter of following the straight and narrow rationalistic guides but the impulses of creative energy.

Blake’s faith in the creative imagination as the link between the divine and the human leads him to satirize what he perceived as the rational materialism underpinning Enlightenment Christianity. Five sections of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are titled “A Memorable Fancy.” Blake uses sarcastically the term “Fancy” (the term used by John Milton and eighteenth century poets for “imagination”). The first of these describes Blake as “walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity”; a “mighty Devil” appears and, just as Blake used corrosives in his engraving process, inscribes the following couplet on a plutonian mountainside:

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,Is an immense World of Delight, clos’d by your senses five?

Unlike the biblical Jehovah who inscribes his Ten Commandments for Moses, Blake’s Devil is more concerned about imagination than ethics. The “fires of hell” burn away the constricting limitations of the material world as perceived by the five senses.

3. Christian Themes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Blake, whose later works belie easy identification with any religious system, has been cautiously interpreted as a Gnostic Christian. However, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an early work, would seem to fit such a label. The very title indicates a quest for mystical unity capable of transcending the apparent dualism of the body and soul, physical and metaphysical worlds. Also, his identification with the devils in the work conforms to the Gnostic belief that a demiurge rather than the transcendent godhead was responsible for creating the material world.

In the work’s second “Memorable Fancy,” Blake “dines” with Ezekial and Isaiah, who sound more like Gnostic seekers than Old Testament prophets. When Blake asks them to explain how God spoke to them, the latter responds: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded, and remain confirm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.”

The section ends with a famous epigram later borrowed by Aldous Huxley for the title of his influential book on hallucinatory mescaline and then adopted by the 1960’s rock group The Doors: If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

While Blake seems to undertake the Gnostic’s quest for hidden knowledge, he does not assume the Gnostic denial of the reality of the body or physical world. Thus his search for the infinite comes not through denial of the senses but by an expansion of them.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell also sketches Blake’s unusual, if not heterodox, vision of Jesus Christ. Blake sees Christ as an incarnation of the eternal Logos or Word, but one that is at odds with a biblical literalism symbolized by the Ten Commandments. In the fifth “Memorable Fancy” Blake presents a dialogue between an angel and a devil regarding Jesus’ adherence to Old Testament law. After a literalistic angel argues that God and Jesus are one in the law, a subtle devil responds that Jesus broke many of the Ten Commandments, including ignoring the Sabbath and protecting the woman caught in adultery. The devil concludes: “Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.”

(from Enote)

4. "A Memorable Fancy"

A MEMORABLE FANCY

An Angel came to me and said: “O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible, O dreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all Eternity, to which thou art going in such career.”

I said: “Perhaps you will be willing to show me my eternal lot, and we will contemplate together upon it, and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable.”

So he took me through a stable, and through a church, and down into the church vault, at the end of which was a mill; through the mill we went, and came to a cave; down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as a nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by[32] the roots of trees, and hung over this immensity; but I said: “If you please, we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whether Providence is here also; if you will not, I will.” But he answered: “Do not presume, O young man; but as we here remain, behold thy lot, which will soon appear when the darkness passes away.”

So I remained with him sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus, which hung with the head downward into the deep.

By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolved vast spiders, crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most[33] terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; and the air was full of them, and seemed composed of them. These are Devils, and are called powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot. He said: “Between the black and white spiders.”

But now, from between the black and white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled through the deep, blackening all beneath so that the nether deep grew black as a sea, and rolled with a terrible noise. Beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking East between the clouds and the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones’ throw from us appeared and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent. At last to the East, distant about three degrees, appeared a fiery crest above the waves;[34] slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks, till we discovered two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke; and now we saw it was the head of Leviathan. His forehead was divided into streaks of green and purple, like those on a tiger’s forehead; soon we saw his mouth and red gills hang just above the raging foam, tinging the black deeps with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence.

My friend the Angel climbed up from his station into the mill. I remained alone, and then this appearance was no more; but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper who sung to the harp; and his theme was: “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

[35]

But I arose, and sought for the mill, and there I found my Angel, who, surprised, asked me how I escaped.

I answered: “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight, hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I show you yours?” He laughed at my proposal; but I by force suddenly caught him in my arms, and flew Westerly through the night, till we were elevated above the earth’s shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun; here I clothed myself in white, and taking in my hand Swedenborg’s volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to Saturn. Here I stayed to rest, and then leaped into the void between Saturn and the fixed stars.

[36]

“Here,” said I, “is your lot; in this space, if space it may be called.” Soon we saw the stable and the church, and I took him to the altar and opened the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended, driving the Angel before me. Soon we saw seven houses of brick. One we entered. In it were a number of monkeys, baboons, and all of that species, chained by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but withheld by the shortness of their chains. However, I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with and then devoured by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk; this, after grinning and kissing it with seeming fondness, they devoured too. And here and there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off[37] his own tail. As the stench terribly annoyed us both, we went into the mill; and I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotle’s Analytics.

So the Angel said: “Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed.”

I answered: “We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.”

* * *

“I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.

“Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; though it is only the contents or index of already published books.

[38]

“A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceived himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shows the folly of churches, and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.

“Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods.

“And now hear the reason: he conversed with Angels who are all religious, and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable through his conceited notions.

“Thus Swedenborg’s writings are a recapitulation of all superficial[39] opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.

“Have now another plain fact: any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number.

“But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.”

[40]

A MEMORABLE FANCY

Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil uttered these words: “The worship of God is, honouring His gifts in other men each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best. Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.”

The Angel hearing this became almost blue, but mastering himself he grew yellow, and at last white-pink and smiling, and then replied: “Thou idolater, is not God One? and is not He visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given His sanction to the law of ten commandments? and are not all other men fools, sinners, and nothings?”

[41]

The Devil answered: “Bray a fool in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him. If Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love Him in the greatest degree. Now hear how He has given His sanction to the law of ten commandments. Did He not mock at the Sabbath, and so mock the Sabbath’s God? murder those who were murdered because of Him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery, steal the labour of others to support Him? bear false witness when He omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when He prayed for His disciples, and when He bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.”

[42]

When he had so spoken, I beheld the Angel, who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, and he was consumed, and arose as Elijah.

Note.—This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.

I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.

One law for the lion and ox is Oppression.

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