Blake’s Religious and Political Dissent [by Richard Crawford]
(This is the second part of a blog on William Blake, the poet, artist and dissenter. In the first part, David McCulloch focussed on Blake’s life, spirituality and verse. In this part, Richard Crawford examines Blake’s religious and political dissent through his art.)
William Blake (1757-1827) lived in turbulent times - in 1776, the American War of Independence freed America from British rule, and in 1789 the French Revolution overturned the Ancien Regime in France, sending shock waves through English society and unsettling beliefs in a fixed social order. Blake’s prints and paintings explored the tensions between popular aspirations for freedom, and the conservative social and political institutions that held them captive. In his art, Blake articulated his opposition to the restrictive moral codes that regulated what he saw as ‘innocent’ human nature and subordinated the individual will to that of the Church and State. He opposed any institutionalised force that enslaved the human spirit. Blake’s vision, for example, would never have tolerated the imposition of Putin’s will over the free people of the Ukraine through Russian invasion.
In short, William Blake was a dissenter. He has been called an “Antinomian caught up in the Enlightenment” (Thompson 1993:105) because Antinomians challenged the imposition of moral or religious laws by temporal powers like Church and State. Blake felt that these institutions had no God-given right to impose their views on moral conduct on the general population. His opposition to the orthodoxies of his time found expression in the engravings he produced in which symbolic or Biblical characters play out the struggle between divine goodness and satanic evil.
Blake’s symbolism was drawn from multiple dissenting theologies in circulation in the latter half of the 18th century, chief amongst which were the Boehmist, Swedenborgian and Muggletonian doctrines. Boehmists believed, like Blake, that direct divine revelation was the only route to religious truth, whilst Swedenborgians challenged the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity and believed that every human being comprised a trinity of Soul, Body and ‘Operation’. Muggletonians agreed with Swedenborgians that humans are essentially divine, but believed that due to the intervention of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, they were also partly evil. Consequently, they believed that every individual has a divided nature in which good and evil are always in conflict.
Blake was profoundly influenced by Emmanuel Swedenborg’s teachings, and in April 1789 he attended the general conference of the Swedenborgian “New Church” in London and he based his design called The Spiritual Preceptor (1809) on Swedenborg’s book True Christian Religion. He soon decided, however, that the New Church was as subject to “Priestcraft” as the Church of England. All his life, Blake insisted on the centrality of free will, and that the key message of the Christian Gospel is that the teaching and example of Jesus Christ frees the human person to love, rather than be required to follow rules arbitrarily decided by ecclesiastical leaders.
Symbols of Good and Evil.
Much of Blake’s poetic and artistic symbolism can be traced back to these dissenting doctrines. For example, he depicted the serpent in the Garden of Eden wrapping itself possessively around the body of Eve, through which action, according to Muggletonian doctrine, it implanted ‘the seed of the devil’ and thus introduced evil into the world. Fortunately, as God had already created both Adam and Eve, the children Eve bore (and therefore ultimately everyone in the world) carried both Divine and Satanic influences inside them (Thompson 1993:74).
The power of good or evil was often represented in Blake’s work by light or fire. The host of angels that emit a brilliant light in his engraving Angels appearing to the Shepherds – a scene from the Nativity – glow with divine power. Their powerful light illuminates the world around them, but does not threaten the shepherds who look up at the angelic host.
When human bodies emit light in Blake’s engravings, they recall the idea that Christ was described as “the light that lighteth every man” (Thompson 1993:82). Shining figures like Albion radiate benign power. Blake may have found the contemporary idea that humans were born with Christ-like goodness appealing, because it challenged the authority of ecclesiastical institutions to impose moral standards on ordinary people, due to their supposed innate sinfulness.
In some contexts, fire represents a destructive power. The ‘Chariot of Fire’ that appears in God Judging Adam was probably based on the Old Testament story of Elijah, in which: “a chariot of fire pulled by horses of fire came between them, and Elijah was taken up to heaven by a whirlwind”. (Kings 2:3–9). The naked figure of Adam would have felt intimidated by the heat of the flames, whereas in Blake’s illustration, God seems impervious to their heat. The flames give God added power to back up his authority – they weaponize his chariot.
God Judging Adam represents symbolically all that Blake disliked about the imposition of moral systems on ordinary people. In this engraving the figure in the chariot points his sceptre accusingly at Adam. He is Urizen, a character in Blake’s mythology who bears a strong similarity to the Old Testament God, who in Blake’s convictions imposed his laws upon human society through the Ten Commandments. In the Book of Urizen he also bears a striking resemblance to the ‘Demiurge’ in Platonic and Gnostic doctrines who was responsible for fashioning the physical universe. Blake’s mythology was full of imaginative reinterpretations of figures such as Urizen. Each served to articulate some element of his Antinomian narrative of resistance to the laws and moral codes imposed by the institutional powers of his day. Urizen is a law-maker whose fiery chariot enables him to command Adam’s obedience. Like the Red Dragon from the Book of Revelation, Urizen employs coercive force to advance and propagate his own particular interests, which, although less brutal than Satan’s, are none the less imposed on Blake’s Adam, seen as an Everyman figure.
Blake could not let this state of affairs go unchallenged. He created an oppositional “demon” to Urizen, called Orc, who represents the spirit of rebellion that had inspired both the French Revolution and the American War of Independence. Orc is vigorous and free. He defies the repressive laws of the bearded patriarch Urizen. Orc gives off heat, not light, and although Blake saw him as the spirit of Liberty, he brought with him “fire and destruction” (Crawford 2011:193). Both the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary Wars involved destruction and great loss of life although both were characterised as acts of liberation by those who pursued them. Blake, however, did not see the freedom signified by the recent American Revolution as purely a triumph, as the design for the concluding page of America, a Prophecy (1793) makes clear. Barren trees, bowed mourners, thistles, and serpents show that grief will follow this triumph of liberty. Blake’s designs often reveal an profoundly ambiguous message.
Another challenge to a God seen as imposing order on the world appears in the frontispiece to Europe. It includes one of Blake’s best-known images: sometimes called The Ancient of Days, representing a naked, bearded old man leaning out from the sun to define the universe with golden compasses. It has become a familiar image of God seen as Creator, but the usual notions about this deity are challenged by an image, on the facing title page, of what the God of reason has created: a coiling serpent with open mouth and forked tongue that, as we saw earlier, was the bringer of evil into the world. Blake here seems to be challenging the notion that the God of mathematical logic and reason, “the God of the philosophers”, is the only possible truth about God in a rationalist age. The God of law and order, for Blake, directly creates the lack of love and loss of freedom characteristic of everyday human experience.
Blake’s Dissent from the Academy
William Blake is now widely regarded as the most original of English Romantic artists. However, in his lifetime he was generally neglected by the artistic community or (unjustly) dismissed as mad. Needless to say, Blake’s uncompromising dissent towards the artistic norms of his day mirrored his views towards religion and politics, but was widely scorned by the artistic establishment of his time. Blake openly criticised the views propounded by the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and considered the Royal Academy to be a rich man’s club that denied certain artists (like himself) patronage, because these dissenting artists followed a different vision from the one that Reynolds advocated. Reynolds professed a preference for the colourist approach of painters like Titian and Rubens and thought less of painters like Raphael and Michelangelo, whom Blake admired. This enraged Blake so much that he declared that Joshua Reynolds was working for Satan by following Rubens’ example. Blake acknowledged that Rubens’ paintings were beautifully executed, but they lacked a vital ingredient in art: inspiration. As he wrote:
“they have taken the shadow for the substance; and make the mechanical felicity the chief excellence of the art”
(Blake’s annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds 1798)
Blake argued that Academic artists were too attached to the materialist view of the world and that they overlooked the importance of inspiration. He wrote in the margins of the catalogue for one of Reynolds’ exhibitions that every eye sees differently: “As the Eye - Such the Object”. Blake upheld the theory that knowledge and truth is something constructed by the subjectivity of every individual, not objectively perceived by the eye, interpreted by the brain, and translated into paint by pictures on the walls of institutions like the Royal Academy. He was scathing about Reynolds’ unimaginative view of art: “He [Reynolds] examines his own mind, and perceives there nothing of . . . divine inspiration … [He never] travelled to heaven to gather new ideas” (Thompson 1993:56). Blake, on the other hand, drew upon his perceived spiritual visions and interpretation of the Bible to feed his artistic imagination. This fact alone makes his art stand apart from most of his contemporaries whose works were based on observational studies and sketches.
Links with the present
Two of Blake’s engravings address the terrible predicament of innocent people threatened by overwhelming evil. The Red Dragon (1803 - 1810) depicts a scene from the Book of Revelation in which a muscular demon towers over a young woman lying defenceless on the ground about to give birth. The demon represents oppressive force – the sheer malevolence of a powerful beast that can, and will, fatally attack anyone that it chooses to target. It stands for the politics of brute strength, for the cynical calculation that ‘might’ confers ‘right’: in short, it stands for what Putin is doing to Ukraine. Blake must have wanted to redress the power balance between the two protagonists in this Apocalyptic drama because he made another engraving from Revelation in which he gives a woman a chance to escape the predatory demon.
Two of Blake’s engravings address the terrible predicament of innocent people threatened by overwhelming evil. The Red Dragon (1803 - 1810) depicts a scene from the Book of Revelation in which a muscular demon towers over a young woman lying defenceless on the ground about to give birth. The demon represents oppressive force – the sheer malevolence of a powerful beast that can, and will, fatally attack anyone that it chooses to target. It stands for the politics of brute strength, for the cynical calculation that ‘might’ confers ‘right’: in short, it stands for what Putin is doing to Ukraine. Blake must have wanted to redress the power balance between the two protagonists in this Apocalyptic drama because he made another engraving from Revelation in which he gives a woman a chance to escape the predatory demon.
In this image taken from another passage in the Book of Revelation, rays from the sun surround the woman’s head like a halo of goodness. She sits on the moon, which reflects the light of the sun onto her glowing body. In contrast, the Red Dragon is a dark Satanic figure that swoops out of the night sky emitting bolts of lightning, but these bursts of destructive energy cannot penetrate the golden halo that protects the woman beneath its outstretched arms. Here is an image of innocence threatened by brute power, protected by the light of truth and goodness that resides in a pure heart. The woman clothed with the sun will be able to escape the tyranny of the Red Dragon because she has golden wings by which she can fly to freedom.
In this engraving, Blake graphically expressed his belief that the innate if hidden power of innocence would overcome the overt power of oppression eventually. The second version of this conflict between good and evil is more hopeful than the first. It suggests that innocence can escape being ‘devoured’ by evil ideologies that threaten to extinguish natural goodness. It may only be a story, but it is still a hope worth clinging onto in our own troubled time.
Crawford, J. (2011) Raising Milton’s Ghost; John Milton and the Sublime Terror in the early Romantic Period. London. Bloomsbury.
Thompson, E. P. (1993) Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge. The University Press.
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