The monstrous myths of Blake's Book of Job

READING Blake is like slamming your finger in the hinges of a door. Blake subsumes Christianity in his own system of spiritual values. Some would say he was mad. Certainly what he said was blasphemous. He makes Christ a sinner, Our Lady a whore and the Church of Rome idolatrous.
Blake was as heretical as anyone could be. He took the doctrines of Christianity and used them in wholly different ways. He held, for example, that Christ triumphed only when he put off the natural body of man and became the divine human that God is.
In her latest scholarly book*, Kathleen Raine shows how the superficially orthodox illustrations to the Book of Job, which Blake published in 1825, contain a manifesto of his own monstrous mythology. Dr Raine is a fan of Blake's and takes seriously his status as a spiritual teacher. She is an adherent of neoHermeticism, which may be traced back to Gnosticism, the earliest heresy in Christianity. That is not to say that I oppose Dr Raine, or Blake, for Hermeticism makes very good poetry.
The problem is that poets are liars, as Plato himself admitted when he decided to ban them from his Republic. The things they say do not correspond to reality. But the stories they tell can correspond to the truth — by analogy, symbolism and most importantly by myth.
Blake had an insatiable appetite to make myths. He did it not only on paper but in life. We all know that he and his long-suffering wife sat naked in the little garden of their Lambeth home and read Paradise Lost to the consternation of the neighbours. Blake talked with God all day — a God of his own invention.
Dr Raine sets out to show how Blake's ideas fit in with the tradition of Hermetic thought and the caste of mind of eastern religions. She stresses the importance in his system of the teachings of Swedenborg, who declared the beginning of his new age and ultimate church in 1757, the year of Blake's birth. We don't seem to have heard much from it since, (Flaxman the neo-classical artist friend of Blake and Sir John Soane was a Swedenborgian — they have just pulled down his house in London.) Blake attacked what he called 'natural religion', by which he meant not just the products of philosophy, but the whole principle that material things are obviously real and just perceived by our minds. He would say mind makes reality. He believed all religions are one and that materialism has merely corrupted the eternal gospel of Jesus. the original religion of all men.
Jesus, the end of this religion, is not the God-made-man of history. In fact God is a man, only without the body which limits us and which is the product of a wicked demiurge. He uses the Bible to serve as the text to preach this Everlasting Gospel.
It is-aeir surprising that the 18th Century inta„whicUte was born did not understand whim. His find. Crabh Robinson took record of what he said but finally went away puzzled: "Whoever believes in Nature, said Blake, disbelieves in God — for Nature is the work of the Devil. On my obtaining from him the declaration that the Bible was the work of God, I referred to the commencement of Genesis — In the beginning God created the Heaven & the Earth — But I gained nothing by this for I was triumphantly told that this God was not Jehovah, but the Elohim, and the doctrine of the Gnostics repeated with sufficient consistency to silence one so unlearned as myself."
Blake's later life saw the rise of the romantics and the nature-worshippers such as Wordsworth. He had no sympathy for them. He also hated Newton (himself a mystic) Locke and the empiricists, Aquinas and Aristotle (but not quite as much as Dr Raine). If he were still alive he would hate Kung and Teilhard de Chardin. He admired Milton — the Arian and dissenter.
The beliefs Blake held are largely irrelevant to orthodox Christians, who believe such amazing and powerful myths themselves that they are in a strong position. But they are important in explaining Blake's poetry and his visual art. And these are important, if you are looking for moral use from art, in making us more wisely receptive to the myths God has revealed — which have the advantage of being true and efficacious.
Blake's 21 main plates (seven times three) illustrate Job faithfully. They are of his finest work. The pictures we reproduce unfortunately omit the borders which bear the quotations and incidental symbols Blake chose to surround them with.
I shall borrow some of Dr Raine's scholarship to show a few of the significances behind the images.
Plate one: Job's family look contented in prayer. Above, Blake has inscribed "Our Father which art in Heaven hallowed be thy Name", and below "The letter Killeth, the Spirit giveth Life". Job is incapable of praying to God till he sees his likeness (which Blake held was Jesus, the Divine Human, before the Incarnation).
Plate two: the third in Blake's series. Dr Raine says: "Blake is on the side of energy and desire, evil and Hell: for 'Energy is Eternal Delight'." Blake uses the world 'evil' otherwise than as moral evil only.
Plate seven (Blake's sixteenth) Reminiscent of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, which Blake admired. Satan is cast down with a male and female figure, representing the selves of Job and his wife. Their 'spectres' are being thrown aside, as Christ's was at the Resurrection.
*The Human Face of God — William Blake and the Book of Job (Thames and Hudson, £20).