BLAKE'S EVERLASTING GOSPEL

‘The Everlasting Gospel’ is not one of Blake’s more famous poems.  It is unfinished; it was, I think, found in draft form among his notebooks.  When I felt stirred to write about it after a cursory reading – a detailed reading is difficult since sections c and d are two different versions of the same material, and we don’t know which one Blake would ultimately have gone with – I found myself in a quandary as to which folder of my essays to file it in.   Literary, or Theological?  I decided on the latter: it is the theological ideas I am focusing on here, not the quality of the poetry. 

 

It is worth quoting the opening stanza in full, since it so unequivocally sets the tone of the poem as a whole:

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see

Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy:

Thine has a great hook nose like thine,

Mine has a snub nose like to mine:

Thine is the friend of All Mankind.,

Mine speaks in parables to the Blind:

Thine loves the same world that mine hates,

Thy Heaven doors are my Hell gates.

Socrates taught what Meletus

Loath’d as a Nation’s bitterest Curse,

And Caiphas was in his own Mind

A benefactor to Mankind:

Both read the Bible day & night,

But thou read’st black where I read white.  

    

     It is tempting here, from the standpoint of 2013, to view Blake as a sort of proto postmodernist.  You see one thing, I see another; you read it one way, I read it the opposite.  The reader creates the meaning: we each have our truth – even when your truth contradicts mine – since all truth is subjective anyway.

     I don’t think, though – in the light of what he writes and draws elsewhere – that  Blake is saying that at all.  Blake thinks he is right, and that his opponents are wrong.  From Blake’s oeuvre as a whole, he thinks the Church has misinterpreted Christ’s message: particularly in relation to  sex.   He’s not content to say that the Church sees it one way, and he sees it another; he thinks the Church has blighted human potential. 

     To get back to specifics, what is Blake saying in these lines?  The first two, I think are uncontroversial enough.  Christianity – along with every other belief system, sacred or secular, known to humanity (my words, not Blake’s) – has differences of opinion.  One thinks immediately of variant interpretations of the Millennium, of Protestantism and  Catholicism, of Arminianism and Calvinism.  One is reminded of John Wesley’s comment to his friend, George Whitefield: “Your God is my Devil.”   

     One is reminded, too, however, of how great a common core of belief there is, despite individual divergences.  When those mentioned above are compared with outright unbelievers, then the differences between them seem to fade.   

     I can go along, then, with lines 1 and 2.  It is lines 3 and 4 that begin to make me uneasy.   Blake seems to be taking the jibe of sceptics – that Man creates God in his own image – and extending it to Christ.  Christians remake Christ in their own image. 

     If Blake is indeed saying this, then hasn’t he got it the wrong way round?  Christians, surely, are meant to remake themselves – even though none does it perfectly – to be like Christ?  Nowhere are we told to remake Christ  to be like us.  If we do, we have lost hold of the Gospel: the real Gospel, that is, not Blake’s idiosyncratic version of it. 

     In Luke 2:40, we are told that the child grew big and strong.  This is the only physical description of the incarnate Christ that we are given.   In that sense, of course, Blake is quite right: we are free to imagine Christ’s appearance for ourselves.  But within limits: of sex, age and race.  When German Nordic supremacists imagined a blue-eyed Aryan Christ, the consensus is that they had lost touch not only with Christianity’s Jewish roots, but with Christianity itself. 

     But my unease with Blake does not stop there.  We might say that Socrates’ looks did  have some bearing on his teaching: his followers marvelled that anyone so ugly could have had such a beautiful mind.  And by focusing on Christ’s looks, Blake seems to me to reduce him the level of just another human teacher, such as Socrates.  Where Christ’s appearance is described is in Revelation: in which Christ describes himself as “the risen one”.  That surely, should be the ultimate focus for Christians: not the Christ who died, but the Christ who rose from the dead; not just the perfect human, but the Second Person of the Trinity.  When we say we have a relationship with Christ, we mean the live one in Heaven; we mean more than our memory of the one who lived and died on Earth.

    From this initial position, Blake proceeds to some mental sleight of hand.  Because we are free – within limits – to imagine for ourselves what Christ looked like, we are also free to imagine for ourselves – Blake certainly does – what Christ said and did.  In practice, we are not.  If we are not told what Christ looked like, we are told what he said and did in considerable detail.  And if some parables are intended for us to tease out the meaning; others are pretty unambiguous.  If you read the story of the Good Samaritan to mean that you should ignore those in trouble and  help only those of your own tribe, then I submit you are not simply giving your own reading – your black to my white – you are actually mistaken.

     Blake would, doubtless, have conceded that point.  The Good Samaritan would not be  at issue.  Although Blake does not spell it out at this point, the black and white he is referring to are different attitudes to sex: the Church finding sex ugly when really it is beautiful.  Thus the Church teaches sexual restriction, whereas Christ taught sexual licence.  We see this in Section e of the poem:

                        Was Jesus Chaste? Or did he

                        Give any Lessons of Chastity?

                        The morning blush’d fiery red:

                        Mary was found in Adulterous bed;

                        Earth groan’d beneath, & Heaven above

                        Trembled at discovery of Love.

 

     Blake seems here to be suggesting that these are open questions.  They aren’t: there are specific answers.  Yes He was, and Yes He did. 

     Bertrand Russell had fun with God’s adultery with the Virgin Mary, but Blake has here beaten him to it by a couple of centuries.  Blake himself, of course, is simply drawing on the old anti-Christian Jewish story that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier.  

    We should note that line 4 of this section is a statement not a question.  The reasoning behind it goes like this.  The Virgin Birth did not happen because Christ was simply human.    Joseph was not his father; therefore, Mary committed adultery. 

     There is, of course, another possibility. The Virgin Birth is incredible only if we know for certain that God is the psychological invention of the sexually repressed.  (Blake got there before Freud as well).  But if there is a Creator God who invented humans – and therefore their reproductive processes – then it is not beyond such a God to bypass the ordinary reproductive methods and initiate a virginal conception.  With such a scenario, adultery is not the issue: human salvation is.  

     I am not sure, though, that Blake’s purpose – as Russell’s certainly was – is to discredit the Virgin Birth.  Since Blake, according to his own account, saw an angel in a tree, we should be wary of trying to write him off as an atheist.  I think he is celebrating, rather, the glory of the sex act in all its manifestations, including the adulterous. Maybe God in reality is a bit of a prude; maybe only God as misrepresented by the Bible.  Either way, Blake has to put God on the right track and get him to see the beauty of sex.  Mary experiences love, and one of the ways in which love expresses itself will be in extramarital union: it’s all about not thwarting the holiness of the heart’s desires and so on.  No wonder Blake has been so popular in the universities of California.   No wonder The Doors, the California  Kings of Acid Rock, took their name from a line of his poetry.

     We might note in passing that when Blake propounded this sort of stuff to his wife she was appalled.  Nor did she want to walk naked in the garden to recapture the morning of the world.  Perhaps she was simply more conscious than Blake was of what the neighbours might think.

    In the next bit of Blake’s Gospel, Christ lays his hand on Moses’ law and throws it away – Matthew’s Gospel, perhaps more authoritative, says something rather different: the opposite, in fact – by showing his approval of adultery.  He does not condemn the woman brought before him to be stoned.  The appendix to John’s Gospel, in which the incident occurs, does not share Blake’s interpretation of the event..  After his forgiveness, Christ says, “Sin no more.”  That does rather change the emphasis.  Blake, unsurprisingly for his line of argument, does not refer to this bit.  It would make Christ judgmental. 

 

                        Was Jesus Humble? Or did he

                        Give any Proofs of Humility?

 

     Thus the opening lines of Sections c and d of the poem.

     The biblical answer to both questions is, “Yes.”   Jesus washed his disciples’ feet.  Jesus refused Satan’s offers of worldly glory.  To say you are God is arrogant only if it is a lie.  If it is true, what else would you say?   

     Blake’s own answers to his questions – in both sections – seem to me to be sheer verbiage.  Maybe that is why there are two sections: Blake was still thinking through the implications.  What he seems to be saying is that Christ’s supposed humility is really pride, when seen from the correct perspective.

     If so, it’s a condensed version of the idea contained in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  The Bible and the Church, fearing energy, creativity etc demonize them and call them Hell.  Hell, however, is really Heaven if only you can see it as it really is.   It was to counter ideas like these that C S Lewis wrote The Great Divorce.    

     For, again, a perspective other than Blake’s is possible.  Those who described Auschwitz as Hell on Earth didn’t have its energy or creativity in mind.  Most of those who experienced it didn’t feel that it was Heavenly, if only seen from the right perspective.   I doubt that Blake himself would have done, if he had been there.

 

Despite all the above, I still love Blake as a man and as a poet.  I always feel sure that his heart is in the right place.  I just wish I could feel more confident about his head.