No worthy symbol of God existed but the
inner world, the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many
names, 'Jerusalem,' 'Liberty,' 'Eden,' 'The Divine Vision,' 'The Body
of God,' 'The Human Form Divine,' 'The Divine Members,' and whose most
intimate expression was art and poetry.
inner world, the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many
names, 'Jerusalem,' 'Liberty,' 'Eden,' 'The Divine Vision,' 'The Body
of God,' 'The Human Form Divine,' 'The Divine Members,' and whose most
intimate expression was art and poetry.
Yeats
At another moment he called Dante 'an atheist, a mere
politician busied about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old
age, returned to God whom he had had in his childhood. ' 'Everything is
atheism,' he has already explained, 'which assumed the reality of the
natural and unspiritual world. ' Dante, he held, assumed its reality
when he made obedience to its laws a condition of man's happiness
hereafter, and he set Swedenborg beside Dante in misbelief for
calling Nature 'the ultimate of Heaven,' a lowest rung, as it were,
of Jacob's ladder, instead of a net woven by Satan to entangle our
wandering joys and bring our hearts into captivity. There are certain
curious unfinished diagrams scattered here and there among the now
separated pages of the sketch-book, and of these there is one which,
had it had all its concentric rings filled with names, would have
been a systematic exposition of his animosities and of their various
intensity. It represents Paradise, and in the midst, where Dante
emerges from the earthly Paradise, is written 'Homer,' and in the next
circle 'Swedenborg,' and on the margin these words: 'Everything in
Dante's Paradise shows that he has made the earth the foundation of
all, and its goddess Nature, memory,' memory of sensations, 'not the
Holy Ghost. . . . Round Purgatory is Paradise, and round Paradise vacuum.
Homer is the centre of all, I mean the poetry of the heathen. ' The
statement that round Paradise is vacuum is a proof of the persistence
of his ideas, and of his curiously literal understanding of his own
symbols; for it is but another form of the charge made against Milton
many years before in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. 'In Milton
the Father is destiny, the Son a ratio of the five senses,' Blake's
definition of the reason which is the enemy of the imagination, 'and
the Holy Ghost vacuum. ' Dante, like other mediaeval mystics, symbolized
the highest order of created beings by the fixed stars, and God by the
darkness beyond them, the _Primum Mobile_. Blake, absorbed in his very
different vision, in which God took always a human shape, believed
that to think of God under a symbol drawn from the outer world was in
itself idolatry, but that to imagine Him as an unpeopled immensity
was to think of Him under the one symbol furthest from His essence--it
being a creation of the ruining reason, 'generalizing' away 'the minute
particulars of life. ' Instead of seeking God in the deserts of time
and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called 'the abstract
void,' he believed that the further he dropped behind him memory of
time and space, reason builded upon sensation, morality founded for the
ordering of the world; and the more he was absorbed in emotion; and,
above all, in emotion escaped from the impulse of bodily longing and
the restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion; the nearer did
he come to Eden's 'breathing garden,' to use his beautiful phrase, and
to the unveiled face of God.
No worthy symbol of God existed but the
inner world, the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many
names, 'Jerusalem,' 'Liberty,' 'Eden,' 'The Divine Vision,' 'The Body
of God,' 'The Human Form Divine,' 'The Divine Members,' and whose most
intimate expression was art and poetry. He always sang of God under
this symbol:
'For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And Love the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine--
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. '
Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the
sun, the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the
stars, where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that
were of old, and the iron throne of Satan.
By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake's
paradoxical wisdom, and as though there was no important truth
hung from Dante's beam of the balance, I but seek to interpret a
little-understood philosophy rather than one incorporate in the thought
and habits of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its truth from
times and generations; and to us one-half of the philosophy of Dante
is less living than his poetry, while the truth Blake preached and
sang and painted is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile
perfect blossom of the world born in ages of leisure and peace, and
never yet to last more than a little season; the life those Phaeacians,
who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in nothing but in
'the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,' lived before
Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who, having
eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages when
none had time to live, 'the minute particulars of life,' the little
fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful
emotion because they are so little they are hardly of time and space
at all. 'Every space smaller than a globule of man's blood,' he wrote,
'opens into eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow. '
And again, 'Every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal'
in its tenor and value 'to six thousand years, for in this period the
poet's work is done, and all the great events of time start forth,
and are conceived: in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of
the artery. ' Dante, indeed, taught, in the 'Purgatorio,' that sin and
virtue are alike from love, and that love is from God; but this love
he would restrain by a complex eternal law, a complex external Church.
Blake upon the other hand cried scorn upon the whole spectacle of
external things, a vision to pass away in a moment, and preached the
cultivated life, the internal Church which has no laws but beauty,
rapture and labour. 'I know of no other Christianity, and of no other
gospel, than the liberty, both of body and mind, to exercise the
divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal world of which this
vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in
our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies
are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are all their
spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghost any other
than an intellectual fountain?
politician busied about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old
age, returned to God whom he had had in his childhood. ' 'Everything is
atheism,' he has already explained, 'which assumed the reality of the
natural and unspiritual world. ' Dante, he held, assumed its reality
when he made obedience to its laws a condition of man's happiness
hereafter, and he set Swedenborg beside Dante in misbelief for
calling Nature 'the ultimate of Heaven,' a lowest rung, as it were,
of Jacob's ladder, instead of a net woven by Satan to entangle our
wandering joys and bring our hearts into captivity. There are certain
curious unfinished diagrams scattered here and there among the now
separated pages of the sketch-book, and of these there is one which,
had it had all its concentric rings filled with names, would have
been a systematic exposition of his animosities and of their various
intensity. It represents Paradise, and in the midst, where Dante
emerges from the earthly Paradise, is written 'Homer,' and in the next
circle 'Swedenborg,' and on the margin these words: 'Everything in
Dante's Paradise shows that he has made the earth the foundation of
all, and its goddess Nature, memory,' memory of sensations, 'not the
Holy Ghost. . . . Round Purgatory is Paradise, and round Paradise vacuum.
Homer is the centre of all, I mean the poetry of the heathen. ' The
statement that round Paradise is vacuum is a proof of the persistence
of his ideas, and of his curiously literal understanding of his own
symbols; for it is but another form of the charge made against Milton
many years before in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. 'In Milton
the Father is destiny, the Son a ratio of the five senses,' Blake's
definition of the reason which is the enemy of the imagination, 'and
the Holy Ghost vacuum. ' Dante, like other mediaeval mystics, symbolized
the highest order of created beings by the fixed stars, and God by the
darkness beyond them, the _Primum Mobile_. Blake, absorbed in his very
different vision, in which God took always a human shape, believed
that to think of God under a symbol drawn from the outer world was in
itself idolatry, but that to imagine Him as an unpeopled immensity
was to think of Him under the one symbol furthest from His essence--it
being a creation of the ruining reason, 'generalizing' away 'the minute
particulars of life. ' Instead of seeking God in the deserts of time
and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called 'the abstract
void,' he believed that the further he dropped behind him memory of
time and space, reason builded upon sensation, morality founded for the
ordering of the world; and the more he was absorbed in emotion; and,
above all, in emotion escaped from the impulse of bodily longing and
the restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion; the nearer did
he come to Eden's 'breathing garden,' to use his beautiful phrase, and
to the unveiled face of God.
No worthy symbol of God existed but the
inner world, the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many
names, 'Jerusalem,' 'Liberty,' 'Eden,' 'The Divine Vision,' 'The Body
of God,' 'The Human Form Divine,' 'The Divine Members,' and whose most
intimate expression was art and poetry. He always sang of God under
this symbol:
'For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And Love the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine--
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. '
Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the
sun, the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the
stars, where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that
were of old, and the iron throne of Satan.
By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake's
paradoxical wisdom, and as though there was no important truth
hung from Dante's beam of the balance, I but seek to interpret a
little-understood philosophy rather than one incorporate in the thought
and habits of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its truth from
times and generations; and to us one-half of the philosophy of Dante
is less living than his poetry, while the truth Blake preached and
sang and painted is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile
perfect blossom of the world born in ages of leisure and peace, and
never yet to last more than a little season; the life those Phaeacians,
who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in nothing but in
'the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,' lived before
Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who, having
eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages when
none had time to live, 'the minute particulars of life,' the little
fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful
emotion because they are so little they are hardly of time and space
at all. 'Every space smaller than a globule of man's blood,' he wrote,
'opens into eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow. '
And again, 'Every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal'
in its tenor and value 'to six thousand years, for in this period the
poet's work is done, and all the great events of time start forth,
and are conceived: in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of
the artery. ' Dante, indeed, taught, in the 'Purgatorio,' that sin and
virtue are alike from love, and that love is from God; but this love
he would restrain by a complex eternal law, a complex external Church.
Blake upon the other hand cried scorn upon the whole spectacle of
external things, a vision to pass away in a moment, and preached the
cultivated life, the internal Church which has no laws but beauty,
rapture and labour. 'I know of no other Christianity, and of no other
gospel, than the liberty, both of body and mind, to exercise the
divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal world of which this
vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in
our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies
are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are all their
spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghost any other
than an intellectual fountain?
