Flesh in the Age of Reason (65 page)

It was for its vulgar materialism that Godwin despised Christianity. ‘Man is not a vegetable to be governed by sensations of heat and cold, dryness and moisture,’ he expostulated. ‘He is a reasonable creature, capable of perceiving what is eligible and right, of fixing indelibly certain principles upon his mind, and adhering inflexibly to the resolutions he has made.’ By the nineteenth-century clerisy – by poets, bohemians and intellectuals emerging from the Romantic tradition – Christianity itself, yoked to material civilization, came to be questioned as gross and vulgar. A new, secular, imaginative, rational spirituality was emerging, based on the life of the mind and the holiness of the imagination. Godwin passionately championed the intellect and the intellectual: ‘Intellect has a perpetual tendency to proceed. It cannot be held back, but by a power that counteracts its genuine tendency, through every moment of its existence.’

Spirits are Lawful, but not Ghosts; especially Royal Gin is Lawful Spirit.

Vision or Imagination is a Representation of what Eternally Exists Really and Unchangeably

WILLIAM BLAKE

To say that idiosyncrasy was conventional in eighteenth-century England may seem paradoxical, but it was a nation rightly remarkable for what Edmund Burke snarlingly styled the ‘dissidence of dissent’. Dissenters from the established Church in turn dissented from their chosen Nonconformist confessions, until dissenting (‘I did it my way’) became, in the eyes of conservative critics, an obligation, obsession or almost the
summum bonum
. Such elements, as we have just seen, permeate the philosophy of William Godwin, who pressed individualism to the point where ‘co-operation’ was regarded as an evil.

As exemplified by Johnson, Reynolds and Burke, the Christian humanist tradition warned against the presumption of singularity, stressing the ‘uniformity of human nature’ and the soundness of old truths. Conformity and submission were urged in view of human weakness and even depravity. But such figures were fighting a losing battle in an increasingly literate society marked by religious toleration, educational diversity and a lack of censorship. The old values of self-denial and self-repression were increasingly overwhelmed by calls for self-expression.

No one ploughed his own furrow more enthusiastically than Godwin’s contemporary, William Blake (‘The cut worm forgives the
plough’). He would be a slave to no man – ‘I must Create a System,’ he declared, ‘or be enslav’d by another Mans.’ Growing up in London’s rich radical artisan culture and apprenticed as an engraver, Blake became exposed to a multitude of marginal and subterranean religious, social, moral, political and mystical traditions, some derived from the antinomianism of the Commonwealth interlude and others from Continental religious groups, including the Moravians (Lutheran pietists). For a while Blake was a supporter of the Swedish visionary Swedenborg, before shifting allegiance to the seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Boehme. In his ideas, which mainly found expression in verse, and in his line-engravings and water-colours, Blake was a law unto himself, his output a testament to a unique and supercharged imagination.

Blake plunged into debates about the nature of body and soul under God. He was inveterately hostile to the scepticism of the enlightened, preferring a religion of faith:

Mock on, Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, Mock on: ’tis all in vain!

‘Voltaire was immersed in matter,’ scolds a character in Blake’s early unfinished satire ‘An Island in the Moon’, ‘& seems to have understood very little but what he saw before his eyes.’ And Blake himself derided the reductionist mechanistic materialism he associated with that tradition which, as we have seen, inspired Hartley and Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and Godwin, all striving for a natural scientific understanding of mankind. They understood nothing:

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

It was unusual, at this time, for Newton to be thus consigned to the party of the infidel, for mainstream natural theology had confidently fused divine Creation and natural science. But for Blake, natural theology itself was blasphemy, indeed an oxymoron. He demonized
the black trinity of Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton, whose thinking jointly reduced ‘that which is Soul & Life into a Mill or Machine’:

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation: cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.

Here as elsewhere, mechanistic thinking and mechanical models of the mind are (with good reason, as we saw in
Chapter 21
) linked by Blake to the technology of the Industrial Revolution and its new oppressions.

Touting a philosophy which read Nature as mechanistic and the mind as passive, the deadly trio had enthroned in place of the soul (accused Blake) the five material senses regarded as mere windows through which Nature impressed itself upon the sensorium, rather as in Locke’s
tabula rasa
, in which the mind, blank at birth, is then inscribed by the outer world.

It certainly had not been the aim of Locke’s empirical ‘way of ideas’ to preach the passivity of mind, but Locke had indeed denied the reality of innate and distinctive genius. All people were born much of a muchness, innate genius no more existed than innate ideas, and differentials in mind and character were products of experience: ‘of all the men we meet with,’ maintained Locke’s
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
, ‘nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is that which makes the great difference in mankind.’ Such ideas proved influential. ‘Dr. Johnson denied that any child was better than another, but by difference of instruction,’ recorded Boswell. Priestley for his part denied that there was anything special about Newton’s mind; Adam Smith concurred: ‘The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of ’; and so did Godwin:
‘Genius… is not born with us, but generated subsequent to birth.’

Such Lockean views reinforced classical teachings about artistic and literary production. For pundits like Pope, artistry was neither a gift nor supernaturally inspired but at bottom a matter of craftsmanship:

True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

Sir Joshua Reynolds judged likewise: his aesthetics had no truck with divine illumination or spontaneous creativity. He found not merely pretentious but ‘pernicious’ all talk of ‘waiting the call and inspiration of Genius’. Neither a ‘divine gift’ nor a ‘mechanical trade’, painting was a skill, demanding training, knowledge and practice. Imagination was of course prized – Addison celebrated the ‘pleasures of the imagination’, a phrase incorporated into Mark Akenside’s poem of that title. But it had to be tempered with learning, wit and judgement, so as to nip in the bud what Johnson called that ‘dangerous prevalence of imagination’, which could lead to madness.

All this was challenged by new thinking that emerged in the generation before Blake, which refigured genius into a celebration of uniqueness and thought in terms not of composition but of creation. Mechanistic models of mental operations, notably the association of ideas, became supplanted by organic images of creative processes modelled on vegetative growth. In his
Conjectures on Original Composition
(1759), the Anglican clergyman-poet Edward Young saluted originality and creativity – Nature ‘brings us into the world all
Originals:
No two faces, no two minds, are just alike’. ‘The common judgment of humanity’ and all the other old critical nostrums were now denounced as insipidly jejune: rather like youth, individuality deserved its head. Instead of the consensus the Augustans courted, singularity was to be valued: ‘Born
Originals
, how comes it to pass that we die
Copies?
’, bemoaned Young: ‘That medling Ape
Imitation
… destroys all mental Individuality.’ The greatest geniuses were those who went to Nature’s school, and knew no other teacher, and the artist’s first rule must be to have none: ‘Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import
from abroad.’ As we shall see, Blake would have found these defences pusillanimous: he set out to effect a complete rehabilitation of genius.

In ‘An Island in the Moon’, Blake mocks the reductionist tendencies of modern science, toying with the name of Locke (who became ‘John Lookye Gent.’, author of ‘An Easy of Huming Understanding’) and satirizing the folly and pretensions of chemists in a send-up targeted primarily against Priestley. Renamed ‘Inflammable Gass’, the materialist chemist it is who challenges the other prating philosophers with the cry ‘Your reason – Your reason?’, which Blake later converted into the accursed God Urizen.

Blake thus updated Jonathan Swift’s view that in reducing nature to a passive concourse of atoms – the billiard-ball universe – scientists reduce themselves to myopic obsessives capable of figuring the universe only through their own microscopic projections. How could mechanical reason measure the infinite? To seek to know the reason of everything (the sin of Priestley or Urizen) was heresy: belief was what counted. The universe was a mystery to be celebrated by the artist, not a puzzle to be solved by the scientist.

Blake certainly regarded himself as first and foremost a Christian: all he knew ‘was in the Bible’, he told Henry Crabbe Robinson. He was, however, no common Christian defending orthodoxies (against such radicals as Priestley). Christianity, as taught by the Church that was established by law and upheld by pluralist placemen – Bishop Richard Watson was the one who came in for a particular drubbing
*
– was, in his view, a travesty of truth. ‘It is an easy matter for a Bishop to triumph over Paine’s attack, but it is not so easy for one who loves the Bible,’ he comments in his marginal annotations to Watson’s
An Apology for The Bible in a Series of Letters addressed to Thomas Paine
, insisting that ‘it appears to me Now that Tom Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop’. That was a Blakean paradox, because the radical and perhaps revolutionary Paine, though born a Quaker, had explicitly
repudiated Christianity. Brimming with indignation against the Old Testament’s cruel and arbitrary God, his
The Age of Reason
(1794–6) ridiculed the ‘riddles’ and attacked the obscenities of the Scriptures, and praised natural religion: ‘Every religion is good that teaches man to be good.’ ‘I do not believe’, ran Paine’s anti-creed, ‘in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.’ As soon as the destruction of priestcraft put an end to mystery-mongering, ‘the present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason’. Blake had no investment whatever in ‘natural religion’ or an age of reason, however, and his remark was clearly intended to say more about Watson than about Paine. ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798’, he further declared, ‘would cost a man his life’: clearly Church of Englandism had nothing to do with the Bible which was the source of all the artist-visionary knew.

What Blake did share with Paine was the conviction that Christianity as established by law was a punitive and puritanical regime – the law oppressing true spirit. (Here, had he been less incensed, he might have seen he had common ground with Priestley.) Blake hated the preachings of Churches which spied only evil in the flesh, were obsessed with discipline, and made ‘thou shalt not’ their credo. Their persecuting bent created, authorized and policed a world of misery:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

The role of the Churches in upholding a sanctimonious, pharisaical puritanism which makes misery the will of a God of wrath – elsewhere
termed by Blake ‘Nobodaddy’, the ultimate name of the father – is underlined in ‘The Garden of Love’ from the
Songs of Experience
(1794):

I went to the Garden of Love,
And I saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.

Orthodoxy is thus exposed as systematic moral perversion, divorced from the true gospel (‘God is love’). Such sick religion causes the very abominations it deplores and censures: ‘Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion’, he delivered as one of his ‘Proverbs of Hell’. Blake as ever assails the Old Testament repressive regime of the ‘Law’, which creates the evils it pretends to combat. Warped value-systems which father misery, perversion and cruelty on God (making them thus ineluctable) rather than upon holier-than-thou pillars of orthodoxy have to be exposed for what they are, as in his ironically titled ‘A Divine Image’.