Wikipedia. Although Blake’s attacks on conventional religion were shocking in his own day, his rejection of religiosity was not a rejection of religion per se. His view of orthodoxy is evident in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a series of texts written in imitation of Biblical prophecy. Therein, Blake lists several Proverbs of Hell, amongst which are the following:
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
As the catterpillar [sic] chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
In The Everlasting Gospel, Blake does not present Jesus as a philosopher or traditional messianic figure but as a supremely creative being, above dogma, logic and even morality:
If he had been Antichrist Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us:
Gone sneaking into Synagogues
And not usd the Elders & Priests like Dogs,
But humble as a Lamb or Ass,
Obey’d himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not Man to Humble himself
Jesus, for Blake, symbolises the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity: “All had originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.” (Descriptive Catalogue, Plate 39, E543)
Blake designed his own mythology, which appears largely in his prophetic books. Within these Blake describes a number of characters, including ‘Urizen’, ‘Enitharmon’, ‘Bromion’ and ‘Luvah’. This mythology seems to have a basis in the Bible and in Greek mythology, and it accompanies his ideas about the everlasting Gospel.
One of Blake’s strongest objections to orthodox Christianity is that he felt it encouraged the suppression of natural desires and discouraged earthly joy. In A Vision of the Last Judgement, Blake says that:
Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have governd their Passions or have No Passions but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect from which All the Passions Emanate in their Eternal Glory.
One may also note his words concerning religion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
Blake does not subscribe to the notion of a body distinct from the soul that must submit to the rule of the soul, but sees the body as an extension of the soul, derived from the ‘discernment’ of the senses. Thus, the emphasis orthodoxy places upon the denial of bodily urges is a dualistic error born of misapprehension of the relationship between body and soul. Elsewhere, he describes Satan as the ‘state of error’, and as beyond salvation.
Blake opposed the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain, admits evil and apologises for injustice. He abhorred self-denial, which he associated with religious repression and particularly sexual repression: “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” He saw the concept of ‘sin’ as a trap to bind men’s desires (the briars of Garden of Love), and believed that restraint in obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the spirit of life:
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming hair
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits & beauty there.
He did not hold with the doctrine of God as Lord, an entity separate from and superior to mankind; this is shown clearly in his words about Jesus Christ: “He is the only God … and so am I, and so are you.” A telling phrase in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast”. This is very much in line with his belief in liberty and social equality in society and between the sexes.
Emmitsburg.net. Many poems included in William Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794) express Blake’s critical view of the Christian Church. Two poems in particular focus directly on the Christian Church. These poems are “THE GARDEN OF LOVE” and “The Little Vagabond”. In these poems it is obvious that Blake disagrees with many facets of the Christian religion as an institutionalized system. Though he reportedly attended a religious ceremony only three times in his life (his baptism, marriage and funeral service), he claimed himself to be a devout Christian. His philosophy of Christianity was considered blasphemous, but he was never charged with such a crime. However, he did express his critical opinions of the Church in both essay and poetic form.
To understand what is being said in such poems as “THE GARDEN OF LOVE” and “The Little Vagabond” one must consider the poet’s religious, or shall I say spiritual, position. William Blake considered himself to be a monistic Gnostic. That is, he believed what saved a person’s soul was not faith but knowledge. Faith, he felt, was a term that was abused by those who thought spending every Sunday in a church would grant them eternal salvation regardless of what actions they exhibited outside the walls of the church. Church ceremonies were also dry, emotionless and meaningless, according to Blake. Church was evil, as Blake would have put it.
Knowledge was cherished by Blake. He argued that through knowledge one can truly understand Christ, and when this understanding is reached one can then begin to become Christ. Christ was the pinnacle of what a human should strive to be. God and Christ were placed on the same level, and God was not a “clockmaker” or some supreme being placed outside of human capacity; rather, Blake argued that God is something that resides in all of humanity. Blake coined this “Divine Humanity”, the potential for all humanity to come full circle and be humanly divine; this is possible because God and Jesus are both living inside of us from conception, “There is a throne in every man, it is the throne of God” (Blake qtd in Raine 35).
Ultimately life then becomes a struggle of mental strife. The “monistic” portion of Blake’s Gnostic belief comes from his view that materialism (evil) and spiritual (good) are one, furthermore, everything is one. Life is not a constant battle between the two, but life is a culmination of everything, good and bad, that one must plow through and make sense of. This is a heavy topic and for one to completely understand it more must be said. However, the basic principles of his beliefs include knowledge, the understanding that all men are the son of God, and because all men are the sons of God, the potential for “Divine Humanity”. (Raine)
Blake expressed many times that the church was a spiritual obstacle. In “The Little Vagabond” Blake portrays the “loveless morality of the churches” (Raine 148). The church, the clerics of the church and the church ceremony altogether is cold and distant. “Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold” (“The Little Vagabond ln i) is the opening line of the poem. It is obvious that the young child is distraught with his church because it is not quenching his spiritual thirst. However, he offers a remedy:
“But if at the Church they would give us some Ale, / And a pleasant fire our souls to regale, / We’d sing and we’d pray all the live-long day, / Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.” (ln v-viii)
These lines plainly, but clearly, express Blake’s religious stance. The church is a cold place that has kept a distance between its members and itself. Therefore, the meanings of the gospels have been delivered in a way that has no meaning or effectiveness. The word of God has been marginalized when it should in fact be communicated in a kind loving manner. The preacher is God and the members of the church are God as well. Instead, the preacher is a merciless intruder that is penetrating the word into the congregation’s heads not alloying thought, but perpetuating cold disciplined faith.
If the setting of the church were to become more laid back and comfortable then the results would be positive indeed, “And God, like a father rejoicing to see / His children as pleasant and happy as he” (xiii – xiv), but for now the church is a cold place with no fire and no ale. The preacher is as dry as a desert, and the lessons of the gospels are spouted out to an unenthused distant audience. The child in this poem (though told by the bard) shares a close connection (as Blake believed all children did) with God that has not yet been clouded by the harshness of life. Therefore, he can make such observances and offer his advice. Children share a connection with God that is innocent and fair, this theme is made apparent in mostly all of Blake’s poems. Consequently, God is still a loving father to this child (as stated in lines xiii – xiv), and not the vengeful God that the preacher most likely is painting him to be. This poem is used by Blake as a way to communicate his belief that the church was suffering from cold militant preaching rather than warm intoxicating love.
The cold atmosphere of the church carries over into Blake’s poem “THE GARDEN OF LOVE”. Playing on the same feeling of distance and cold, Blake ties in one of his main critiques of the church: the church’s repression of its members and his vigorous anti-clerical stance. This poem is a “Confrontation between natural innocence and cunning repression” (Hirsch 258). Blake saw the establishment of an institutionalized church as an instrument of tyranny. An established church was not only a tool of, political and social repression, but also the very embodiment of repression in all its forms: the repressive authority of the church is the source of a condemnation of all human acts, a condemnation that has shrunk human existence into a dark and turbulent sea of guilt.
The repression noted above is greatly illustrated in the lines that read, “And the gates of the chapel were shut, / And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door” (“THE GARDEN OF LOVE” ln v – vi).
Another facet of the poem worth exploring is the cemetery that has taken place of the garden. “And I saw it was filled with graves, / And tomb-stones where flowers should be” (ix – x). Blake is conveying his belief that the church focuses too much on death and eternal damn nation, also tied to the repression of humanity that the church has bestowed upon its members. Again, an innocent child is victim of the church’s tired effort to control the mind and every aspect of spirituality. Where a child once played a church was built, and on its door were the words that read “Thou shalt not”, and in all around it were graves. A bleak picture is painted by Blake because that is exactly how he viewed the church. He saw the church as a spiritually hindering institution that has misconstrued the true message of the gospels. The fertility of flowers had been replaced with graves, and the promise of new life found through the teachings of Jesus had been replaced by repressive Priests that patrolled the aisles in their black gowns.
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Blake was christened, married, and buried by the rites of the Church of England, but his creed was likely to outrage the orthodox. In A Vision of the Last Judgment he wrote that “the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being,” whom Blake called variously Nobodaddy and Urizen, and in his emblem book For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he addressed Satan as “The Accuser who is The God of This World.” To Robinson “He warmly declared that all he knew is in the Bible. But he understands the Bible in its spiritual sense.” Blake’s religious singularity is demonstrated in his poem The Everlasting Gospel (c. 1818):
The Vision of Christ that thou dost See
Is my Visions Greatest Enemy
…
Both read the Bible day & night
But thou readst black where I read White.
But some of the orthodox not only tolerated but also encouraged Blake. Two of his most important patrons, the Rev. A.S. Mathew and the Rev. Joseph Thomas, were clergymen of the Church of England.
Blake was a religious seeker but not a joiner. He was profoundly influenced by some of the ideas of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and in April 1789 he attended the general conference of the New Church (which had been recently founded by followers of Swedenborg) in London. Blake’s poem The Divine Image (from Songs of Innocence) is implicitly Swedenborgian, and he said that he based his design called The Spiritual Preceptor (1809) on the theologian’s book True Christian Religion. He soon decided, however, that Swedenborg was a “Spiritual Predestinarian,” as he wrote in his copy of Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning the Divine Providence (1790), and that the New Church was as subject to “Priestcraft” as the Church of England.
Blake loved the world of the spirit and abominated institutionalized religion, especially when it was allied with government; he wrote in his annotations to Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1797), “all […] codes given under pretence [sic] of divine command were what Christ pronounced them, The Abomination that maketh desolate, i.e. State Religion” and later in the same text, “The Beast & the Whore rule without control.” According to his longtime friend John Thomas Smith, “He did not for the last forty years attend any place of Divine worship.” For Blake, true worship was private communion with the spirit.
