Literature & Theology, Vol. Æ. No. Æ, June Æ, pp. "Ç–"Æ
doi: 10.1093/litthe/frl014
‘IN INFERNAL LOVE AND
FAITH’: WILLIAM BLAKE’S
THE MARRIAGE OF
HEAVEN AND HELL
Robert W. Rix
Abstract
The satirical The Marriage of Heaven and Hell has long been recognised as a key
work in William Blake’s literary production. Yet the precise nature of his
theological dispute with the mystic philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg in this
text has never been fully explained. Reinserting Blake’s literary work into its
original Swedenborgian context reveals it as a vivacious manifesto of
antinomian theology. By examining Blake’s parody of central
Swedenborgian passages, it is possible to shed new light on the little
understood inversion of ‘devils’ and ‘angels’, which has long frustrated
analyses of the text.
I . I N T RO D U C T I O N
On 14 April 1789, the English poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827)
and his wife, Catherine, attended the First General Conference of the
Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church at the chapel in Great Eastcheap,
London. On this occasion, they signed their names in support of its doctrines.1
For an understanding of Blake’s religious thought, his views on Swedenborg
are important, as the New Jerusalem Church is the only religious organisation
to which he is known to have been connected.
It is well-known that Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell contains
a fierce satire on Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). This now famous work
set an irrevocable public stamp on Blake’s renunciation of Swedenborg as
the prophet, whose teachings would bring about a spiritual regeneration of
the age. Blake’s affiliation with the New Jerusalem Church was apparently
brief. If we can trust the date he scribbled in blue ink, on what today is known
as copy K, the Marriage was produced as early as 1790.
Eliot wrote that Blake ‘accepted Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him,
for reasons of his own’.2 Contrary to this critical resignation, we are not left in
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IN INFERNAL LOVE AND FAITH
the dark. This article is an attempt to enable an understanding of the
disagreement, as it is represented in the Marriage. To make this possible, we
need to take seriously the work as a satire and identify the Swedenborgian
source texts Blake satirises. But before we reach this endeavour, it is useful first
to deal with Swedenborg and Blake’s interest in and disagreement with the
mystic philosopher.
I I . S W E D E N B O RG I A N I S M
Although little known today, Swedenborg was at the centre of an occult
revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.3 Son of an eminent
Lutheran minister in the city of Stockholm, Swedenborg had a long career as
a scientist. He published widely in a number of fields, including anatomy,
geology and chemistry. However, during 1743–45 he had a series of visionary
experiences and subsequently devoted himself to spiritual investigations.
Swedenborg claimed that he, through revelations, had come to understand
the hidden meaning of Scripture, which had hitherto been obscured or merely
understood superficially in the old churches.
Swedenborg held that there was a fundamental interconnection between
the material and the spiritual world, which could be perceived through
‘correspondences’. This did not give way to any monism; the material and
the spiritual were firmly discriminated. But Swedenborg emphasised
the connection between them. In the Bible, the ‘correspondences’ appear
as a coded language, so that natural objects, animals, or names had an
‘inner sense’ relating to one’s spiritual salvation. Thereby, Swedenborg
provided a semiotics of divine significances, which Blake would refer to—and
satirise—as we shall see.4
Swedenborg described a number of visionary journeys to Heaven and Hell,
on which he conversed with angels and devils. What Swedenborg became
witness to in the spiritual world he entitled ‘Memorable Relations’ and placed
at the end of the chapters of his theological books. Their primary function
was to confirm the doctrines he had just proposed in the preceding pages.
It was in the spiritual world he learned how the images of the Bible were
to be interpreted, since their significances were made explicit as visionary
projections.
Blake owned Swedenborg’s books, of which, three annotated copies are
extant. At the time his works were translated from Latin into English in the
mid-1770s, Swedenborgian groups and societies were emerging all over
England. Especially, Manchester and London proved to be a fertile ground
for Swedenborgianism.5 The Swedish prophet also had a large audience who
did not convert, but read the teachings to learn more about the man who
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109
6
had ‘made a lot of noise in the speculative world’. Blake’s attack on
Swedenborg in the Marriage may have been compelled by private grievances,
but, as a satire, it had public potential.
The Marriage was not Blake’s final word on Swedenborg. Morton Paley has
shown Blake’s interest in the mystic philosopher extends to a long list of
borrowings and adaptations in poems etched long after the Marriage was
completed.7 In a trilogy of essays, Joseph Viscomi greatly improved our
critical understanding of the chronology of composition and the
sub-cultural context of the Marriage.8 Viscomi’s meticulous research has
evidenced that the first segment of the work to be completed was the four
consecutive plates, which (in the final organisation of the work)
became Plates 21–24. This is where we find the most direct criticism of
Swedenborg. The work was subsequently expanded piecemeal, through
several print sessions.9 Although many of the later plates are not directly
linked to Swedenborg, Blake’s other writings at the time show that
they reflect ideas that went counter to the increasingly conservative
New Jerusalem Church.
The central area of disagreement is raised on Plate 3, which Blake would
place at the beginning of the finished Marriage. Swedenborg is here mentioned
by name, immediately followed by a renunciation of ‘what the religious call
Good and Evil’.10 The remark is an example of Blake’s so-called
antinomianism, which he here, significantly, turns against the prophet.
III. ANTINOMIANISM AND TH E SPIRIT WITHIN
Antinomianism (Greek: anti, ‘against’; nomos, ‘law’) is a central characteristic
of Blake’s thought, to which we need to turn our attention here. It has
prospered in various forms in the history of English dissent. Morton was
the first to suggest that Blake shared an affinity with a tradition going back
to sectarian heterodoxy of the mid-seventeenth century, most notably the
Ranters and the Muggletonians.11 The Muggletonian connection was later
taken up by Thompson. Blake shared the belief that Christ had abolished
the Moral Law universally for all humankind. This meant that humans were
freed from the obligation to justify themselves by submitting to Moral Law;
Faith was sufficient for salvation.12 Taking into account the recent discovery
that Blake’s mother was not, in fact, Muggletonian, but had connections with
the Moravian Fetter Lane Society, it warrants attention that such notions were
central doctrines of the Moravian Church.13 However, Blake’s renunciation
of sin, punishment, atonement and moral law appear in a number of guises
and different contexts in his work, which frustrate attempts at assigning Blake’s
antinomian ideas to any one tradition.
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IN INFERNAL LOVE AND FAITH
In the Marriage, Blake targets all those moralisers who ‘restrain desire’
(pl. 5; E34). This is targeted broadly at legalistic attempts to control human
behaviour. In ‘A Song of Liberty’, the concluding verse prophecy of the
Marriage, Blake denounces all the ‘pale’ religiousness that makes a virtue
of ‘virginity that wishes but acts not!’ The song is a celebration of the downfall
of the ‘gloomy king’, who ‘promulgates his ten commands’. Humanity’s
release from this combined civil and religious tyranny concludes with
a triumphant statement: ‘every thing that lives is Holy’ (pl. 27; E45). As
we see, this was a fitting conclusion to the Marriage, which was begun
as a criticism of Swedenborg, for whom the Commandments were ‘so holy
that nothing could be holier’.14
Rejection of moralistic laws was often bound up with the rejection of
civil legalism. Jon Mee has described how Blake’s antinomianism converges
with discourses of social and political resistance. From the evidence of
historical sources, he has further shown that this was the case among a number
of antinomian followers in the late eighteenth century London.15 Taking an
even longer historical view, Christopher Hill has outlined how antinomian
heresy spoke for a sense of social justice which ‘necessitated a much freer and
less conventional morality’.16 In England, where Church and State were
integrated, this combined radicalism was, to some extent, constitutionally
determined.
Blake’s promotion of an antinomian freedom from the exacting laws
of morality cannot easily be separated from his notion that true believers
were under the guidance of the spirit within. On this point, Blake shares a
common ground with the seventeenth-century radical sects identified by
Morton and Thompson. According to this Dissenting tradition, external
standards of morality infringed the supreme authority of the inner spirit.17
On Plates 12 and 13 of the Marriage, Blake has Isaiah reject the ‘jews code’, as
the greatest example of ‘subjection’. As a replacement, he promotes a full trust
in a ‘firm perswasion’ of the spirit within (E39). Heeding the inner the spirit,
or ‘Poetic Genius’, is the only way to break the laws set up by despotic priests
or rulers and embrace the fact that ‘the voice of honest indignation is the voice
of God’ (E38).
Swedenborg had claimed that Love and Wisdom was communicated to us
through ‘divine influx’ into the spirit. This idea of ‘influx’ intersects with
ideas of the law and morality, because Swedenborg saw ‘influx’ as a
benchmark for guiding our behaviour and conduct. In True Christian Religion
(n. 833), Swedenborg borrowed from the eighteenth-century mythographical
theories to expose how inner revelation was forgotten as a result of priestly
insistence on external worship. Blake gives a similar historical account in the
Marriage on Plate 11, which contains the history of how ‘Priesthood’
inculcated ‘forms of worship’ and ‘pronounced that the Gods had ordered
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111
such things’. Against this, Blake pits the notion that ‘All deities reside in the
human breast’ (E38).
Blake comments on external worship in an annotation to section n. 220
of Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788). To Swedenborg’s
discussion of the importance of doing good ‘works’ of charity, Blake writes:
‘The Whole of the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies
at all’ (E605). Blake evidently sees true worship of God to be one person’s
active grace towards another, but finds no use for the passive reception
of sacraments as practiced in the liturgy of the New Jerusalem Church.
The comment is interesting not only because it shows that Blake was at
odds with his fellow Swedenborgians, but also because the comment forms
a part of a series of marginal notes to this book that attempt to separate
what humans may do by their own choice and volition from what religious
laws require.
Later in the annotations, Blake airs his disagreement with those interpreters
of Swedenborg who had argued that Good and Truth could be taught
through instruction by ‘Doctrines and Discourses from the Word’.18 Blake
gives Swedenborg’s teaching on ‘influx’ an antinomian turn, interpreting it
to mean that the dictates of right and wrong cannot be through the teaching
of doctrines and theological discussion. When Swedenborg speaks of how
a ‘Marriage of Good and Truth, that is, of Law and Wisdom’ is effected
when man receives ‘the Light of Heaven’, Blake interprets this to mean that
moral life is not communicated ‘thro the understanding’ (E608). Believing
that he is speaking from the authority of Swedenborg’s writing, Blake asks:
‘Is it not false then that love recieves influx thro the understandg as was
asserted in the society’ (E608).
In his works, Blake follows Swedenborg in interpreting the ‘New Heaven’
and the ‘New Earth’ described in Revelation as the dawning of a new era
of spiritual enlightenment. This idea is explicit on Plate 14 of the Marriage,
where Blake writes that the ‘ancient tradition that the world will be
consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true’, but only as the
internal event of humanity having ‘expunged’ religious falsities. This is
also what Swedenborg tried to achieve. Blake acknowledges this in the
Marriage, commenting that ‘Swedenborg . . . shews the folly of churches &
exposes hypocrites’. Unfortunately, as Blake adds below, Swedenborg
fails to deliver a real alternative and ends up writing ‘all the old falshoods’
(pl. 21–22; E42–43).
Thus, in this satire, one may still discern the parallels in Blake’s writing
that reflect his original interest in Swedenborg. Like the mystic philosopher,
Blake rejected Original Sin and saw the possibility that humanity may
repossess Paradise as a leap of faith within the spirit. Blake tells us that, once
religious falsity was cleared from the mind of humans, the cherub, set to guard
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IN INFERNAL LOVE AND FAITH
the Tree of Life after human’s expulsion from Eden (Genesis 3:24), will ‘leave
his guard at the tree of life’ (E39).
But if Swedenborg had done away with Original Sin, he maintained an
unwavering belief in the avoidance of Sin and Vice, and claimed the necessity
of leading a ‘moral life’ (a favourite phrase) as a criterion for entering Heaven.
For the prophet, ‘recognition of Sin and the Discovery of some Sin in Oneself,
is the Beginning of repentance’ (TCR n. 525). This seems to have been one
significant area on which Blake came to disagree with the prophet, which is
also reflected in the Marriage.
Blake unleashes his criticism by satirising Swedenborg’s conversations
with angels and devils in the spiritual world. These conversations were
how the prophet received knowledge of what doctrines one should
follow for salvation and what doctrines led to Hell. This provides the
background for the ‘Memorable Fancy’ on Plates 22–24, where Blake stages
an argument between an angel and a devil. This scene may be modelled
on Swedenborg’s ‘Memorable Relation’, in which angels and devils are
‘permitted to engage in Debate concerning God and Nature’ (TCR n. 77).
In Blake’s version, the discussion turns on how to interpret the acts and
words of Christ. The angel is an orthodox believer, who claims that
Jesus gave his ‘sanction to the law of ten commandments’. This is
vehemently refuted by the antinomian devil, who represents Jesus as an
opponent to both civil and religious authority. According to him,
Jesus systematically violates the Commandments, because he follows the
dictate of the inner spirit:
Now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did
he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who
were murderd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in
adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he
omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples,
and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused
to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these
ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from
rules (pl.23; E43)
The devil’s rejection of the Ten Commandments in the Marriage is directly
related to the satire on Swedenborg in this section of plates. The prophet had,
after all, praised the Ten Commandments by which God had given
instructions for humanity’s ‘moral life’, both as this applies to spiritual and
civil society (TCR n. 329–31, 444).
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I V. B L A K E A N D S W E D E N B O RG I A N J U S T I F I C AT I O N
To evaluate Blake’s shifting views on Swedenborg’s theory of salvation is no
simple matter. He may have found initial encouragement in Swedenborg’s
rejection of orthodox doctrines of reward and punishment, since the prophet
discarded the idea that humanity’s deeds were weighted after death.
Swedenborg replaced it with the idea that humanity was naturally drawn to
either Heaven or Hell to satisfy its ‘Dominant Love’ (amor regnans). Hell was
thus not a place to which one was ‘sent’, but a region where one chooses to go
to pursue illicit passions. If an evil man should enter Heaven, in the mistaken
belief that he belongs there, he would — of own volition — cast himself out,
since he cannot stand the light of God that shines there. On his spiritual
journeys to Heaven, Swedenborg had observed how those who thought that
faith is enough for salvation without the performance of good works had cast
themselves out.19
Swedenborg emphasised that believing in the Gospel is not enough to find
a place in Heaven; without good works our faith cannot be truthful, and we
will therefore not find ourselves at ease in Heaven. However, if Blake would
agree that the person of true faith would naturally be led to charitable deeds,
he disagreed with Swedenborg’s insistence that we should subordinate our
passions to the moral law of the Ten Commandments, which, the prophet
explained, regulated both the spiritual and the civil society, by instructing us to
keep away from evil (TCR n. 282–83).
Swedenborg’s instructions in morality run contrary to the opinion Blake
had expressed in the annotations he made to Johann Kaspar Lavater’s
Aphorisms on Man in 1788. Blake here proclaimed that ‘Vice’ is not ‘what the
laws of King and Priests have calld Vice’. All ‘Act’ is ‘Virtue’, whereas ‘Vice’ is
redefined as the ‘omission of act in self & the hindering of act in another’
(E601). The same place, Blake also states that any law that hinders the freedom
to ‘act’ as oppression. Precisely because one can see that ‘Murder is Hindering
Another’ and ‘Theft is Hindering Another’, Blake’s antinomian thought
avoids total moral chaos. That is to say, the content of the Law may be valid,
but its authority as an external code of instruction is not.
In an antinomian provocation against oppressive laws, Blake states that
‘Active Evil is better than Passive Good’ (E592). Blake is here criticising
Lavater’s notion that a good person is one who chooses not to act ‘though
possessed of energy’. A few years later, Blake would champion ‘energy’ on
Plate 4 of the Marriage. This is an attack on ‘All Bibles or sacred codes’ that
teaches ‘God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies’ (pl. 4;
E34). There is no doubt that Swedenborg’s moral codex of doctrines is
targeted here, since the prophet stressed the need for the ‘fear of eternal
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IN INFERNAL LOVE AND FAITH
Punishment’ as the only way one would abstain from following evil lusts
(TCR n. 525).
From Blake’s later comments on Swedenborg, it can be established that
he came to differ with the prophet over doctrines of Sin and punishment.
In a passage of the poem Milton (1805–1818), Blake writes that the prophet’s
writings ‘deny the value of the Saviour’s blood’ (22.46–54; E117–18). This
should be seen in connection with Blake’s statement at the beginning of
Milton that ‘Christ took on Sin in the Virgins Womb, & put it off on the
Cross’ (5.3; E98). Swedenborg had expressly denied that Christ’s incarnation
meant that redemption of sin was secured for all humankind; individual
repentance was still needed (TCR n. 126). Blake further describes Swedenborg
as a ‘Samson shorn by the Churches!’ This at once acknowledges the prophet’s
promise of wanting to tear down the roof on the old churches and laments
his inability to free himself from the falsities of traditional orthodoxy. First
among the prophet’s errors, Blake tells us, was to that he showed ‘Heaven as
a Punisher and Hell as One under Punishment’ and that ‘Transgressors’ belong
in Hell and ‘proud Warriors’ go to ‘Heaven’ (22.29–54; E118). Blake’s passage
is an integral part of a sustained criticism in Milton of how Britain would
go to war in the name of God. It was not the first time Blake voiced
this criticism; he had earlier attacked the Anglican bishops for authorising
the campaign against France as a holy war against infidelity.20 In the passage,
Blake is as much attacking those who ‘perverted Swedenborg’s Visions’
to support such ideas. Yet, the prophet is clearly to blame, since his
writings perpetuate ‘Laws of Sin’ instead of renouncing them, and thereby
invite beliefs that ‘War and Glory’ against transgressors are religious virtues
(22.45; E117).
If this late reflection cannot be used to determine our reading of the
Marriage, Blake’s antinomian formulations of 1788, in the annotations
to Lavater, predate his attendance at the General Conference of the
New Jerusalem Church. This leaves us with the question of why Blake
would sign his name in support of Swedenborg’s doctrines in early 1789?
Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the early New Jerusalem Church
had not yet settled on a singular dogmatic interpretation of Swedenborg’s
writing, but was torn in disputes. Among other things, this in-fighting led
to the exclusion of several members and the ‘disappearance’ of fourteen
pages from the New Church Minute Book (4 May 1789–11 April 1790) to
cover up a scandal concerning the practical use of Swedenborg’s doctrines
of ‘conjugal love’ and the possibility of keeping concubines, which some
New Churchmen found highly immoral.21
Although none of this may have been directly related to antinomianism,
it is clear from the Swedenborgian journals published at this time that it was
a contentious issue in the early Church. The first page of the first issue of
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New Magazine of Knowledge concerning Heaven and Hell (1790), for example,
stipulates that ‘imputation of good and evil’ is ‘according to a man’s life’; true
faith needed to be actualised in good works. This was an attack on the central
antinomian doctrine of justification by faith alone, which Swedenborg had
consistently deplored as ‘no true faith, but a chimera’ (TCR n. 181). This
doctrine is of Lutheran origin and a central part Protestant theology.
Even if the phrase, by faith alone, does not appear in the Bible, Luther used it
to summarise the teaching of the New Testament, especially Paul’s rejection
of the idea that salvation depends on the obedience to the Law. However,
given an antinomian inflection, Justification by faith alone is turned into
the proposition that good works do not promote salvation for the faithful
who are already saved by their vocation as Christians. Moral instruction is
therefore redundant, both as a means of repentance and as a guide for moral
choices. The believer is directed solely by the power of the Holy Sprit,
which is internal and independent from all external authorities, whether text
or institution.
Thompson has suggested that the zeal with which the Swedenborgian
journals renounced the antinomian trust in faith alone as sufficient for salvation
was a telltale sign of a rift within the Church on this matter.22 In addition to
this, the document of New Jerusalem Church doctrines, to which Blake
signed his name, consisted primarily of positive declarations, yet one warning
is explicit: ‘Justification by faith alone’ is ‘highly dangerous to the rising
generation’, inasmuch as it will ‘ingraft in their infant minds principles
diametrically opposite to those of the New church, and consequently hurtful
to their salvation’.23 It is possible that Blake was part of a faction of
Swedenborgian readers, who had approached Swedenborg’s writing from an
antinomian angle—an interpretation the officials of the New Jerusalem
Church saw unfit for the new separatist organisation.
In populist propaganda against mystical Dissenters, Swedenborgianism
found itself aligned with radical sects that were considered politically
subversive. One commentator lists ‘Swedenborgians alongside Presbyterians,
Independents, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Muggletonians and New-LightMen’.24 A historical document of the same sort, which commands more
scrutiny, is Reid’s The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis
(1800). Reid, a conservative and High-Church detractor of infidelity and
unorthodoxy, claimed that the New Jerusalem Church brought ‘Christianity
in general disrepute’. Especially on one count was he concerned: the London
Swedenborgians’ assertion that no and ‘repentance’ was needed, but ‘belief’
was sufficient for salvation. He concludes that this falsity ‘both Muggletonians
and Swedenborgians enforce upon their followers, as the first and most
essential condition of gospel acceptance’.25 Because Reid’s knowledge of
Swedenborgianism and the New Jerusalem Church are otherwise accurate,
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it warrants attention that he should compare the Swedenborgians with
Muggletonians. The latter group was known for their extreme antinomianism, whereas the official New Jerusalem Church had consistently sought to
dissociate themselves from justification by faith alone. Reid’s knowledge of
Swedenborgianism was probably imparted to him through conversations with
Swedenborgians, whom he met during his time as a radical in London
underground milieus of the early 1790s.26 This is circumstantial evidence that
antinomian beliefs were a heterodoxy that haunted the early New Jerusalem
Church. What it is possible to test, however, is how Blake’s antinomian views
affected his parody of Swedenborg.
V. PA RO DY I N G S W E D E N B O RG
In an exhibition catalogue of 1809, describing sixteen paintings exhibited at
his brother’s shop in Golden Square, Soho, two of the items (which are
now untraced) are influenced by Swedenborg. Blake commends the ‘works
of this visionary’ as ‘well worthy the attention of Painters and Poets; they
are foundations for grand things’ (E546). If Blake, at this time, showed
appreciation of Swedenborg’s ‘correspondences’ as a storehouse of visual and
poetic metaphors, the extent to which he cannibalises Swedenborg’s symbolic
vocabulary for the purpose of parody in the Marriage is still to be fully
documented.27 The references and allusions are many, but our concern here is
only with what relates to antinomian ideas.
The most significant use of Swedenborg’s terms—and one that has
traditionally frustrated attempts at interpretation—is Blake’s inversion of
the values associated with ‘angels’ and ‘devils’. The ‘devils’ are valourised as
possessors of true knowledge, whereas the ‘angels’ are represented as pious
moralists. According to the cosmology Swedenborg outlined in A Treatise
concerning Heaven and Hell (which Blake owned and annotated), angels and
devils are not supernatural beings, but spirits ‘from the Human race’. Men are
transformed into angels or devils according to the life they have lived on earth.
Angels are ‘men who lived in the world in heavenly love and faith’, whereas
devils are ‘men who lived in hellish affections and dispositions’.28 According
to Swedenborg, men who neglect good works, because they have no fear of
punishment, or believe that justification is by faith alone, will, in their spiritual
forms, ‘appear gross, dusky, black and deformed’ (n. 480–81). The term
‘devilish’ is specifically used about the doctrine of ‘Faith without good Works’
(n. 389), and it is clear that Swedenborg places antinomian believers under
punishment in Hell.
In the Marriage, Blake ironically adopts Swedenborg’s view. The ‘angels’ are
the pious believers in orthodoxy, and the ‘devils’ are those ‘men who lived in
infernal love and faith’. Blake’s devils are connected with the libertarian values
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of ‘Eternal Delight’, bodily ‘Energy’ and ‘desire’ (pl. 4–6; E34–35)—which
have traditionally been a stench in the nostrils of orthodox moralisers.
When the speaker of the Marriage visits the devils in ‘the fires of hell’, he
realizes that the fires, which ‘look like torment and insanity’ to the angels,
are in fact the ‘enjoyments of Genius’ (pl. 6; E35). The flames of ‘Hell’ are
associated with fulfilment of desire, as we see it on the frontispiece of the
Marriage. The etching here is a triumphant display of yellow and orange flames
that encircle a number of joyous lovers embracing and kissing. For this
representation, Blake inverts Swedenborg interpretation of Hell’s flames
in metaphoric terms as the fires of unbridled lusts and desires that consume
men from within. These desires had manifested themselves as self-consuming
flames, which can be seen with the spiritual eye surrounding those inflamed
with ‘evil passions’. These passions appear ‘in the form of Fire’ because ‘every
love, according to it’s [sic] kind, corresponds to Fire . . . according to the laws
of Correspondency’. Blake’s irony that the angels believe devils live in the fires
of ‘insanity’ parodies Swedenborg, who wrote that devils are ‘insane in
spiritual things’, and that the transgressor will find himself in ‘the Heat of
Hell . . . that is in its Insanity’. (TCR n. 589, 605).
In the accounts of his spiritual journeys, Swedenborg described at
length how he had observed the impious actions of the law-defying
devils. Blake undermines Swedenborg’s negative evaluation of the hellish
‘communities’ by letting the speaker of the Marriage compile a list of ‘Proverbs
of Hell’, which, in contrast, ‘shew the nature of Infernal wisdom’ (pl. 6; E35).
Among the 72 Proverbs recorded on plates 7–10, there are several provocative
expressions of antinomian liberties, encouraging us to free our energies:
‘He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence’, ‘Prudence is a rich ugly old
maid courted by Incapacity’ and ‘The nakedness of woman is the work
of God.’ Some are even deliberately exaggerated, such as ‘Sooner murder
an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desire’, in order to bring home
the point.
Other ‘Proverbs’ are more obscure and require interpretation. As this is
a satire on Swedenborg’s visits to Hell, it makes sense to read them according
to the fixed key of ‘correspondences’ the prophet used to interpret
the spectacles he observed. To pinpoint one representative example,
we may take ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’
(pl. 9; E37). According to Swedenborg, horses represent theological doctrines,
with their ‘riders’ being the theologians who use them. Blake would refer
to this ‘correspondence’ in his exhibition catalogue of 1809. He writes of
the painting The spiritual Preceptor, an experiment Picture that it is based on
Swedenborg’s ‘Memorable Relation’ in True Christian Religion n. 623 (E546).
This section number describes a spiritual journey, on which Swedenborg
views three hundred men who, despite their confirmation of the doctrine of
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justification by faith alone, believed they belonged in Heaven. When they
realized the admission of Sin belonged in the nether region of Hell, they
descend, in their fall resembling ‘dead Horses’. It is subsequently revealed to
Swedenborg how he should interpret the meaning of ‘Horses’: ‘when a man
engaged in meditating on the Word, his Meditation appears at a distance like a
Horse’. On this occasion, the antinomians came to resemble ‘dead horses’,
because their faith was dead. Animals generally represent Good and Bad
doctrines, so that lambs ‘mean Innocence, Charity, and natural Affection’
(TCR n. 200) and tigers always correspond to the ‘Lusts’ or ‘Diabolic Love’ of
humans (e.g. TCR n. 45, 78, 312 etc.). Blake’s ‘Proverb’ of hellish wisdom
may, therefore, be read as an antinomian challenge to moralistic theology that
restricts human desires by means of moral ‘instruction’.
Blake associates horses with theological legalism in the conclusion to the
apocalyptic ‘A Song of Liberty’. Here, the ‘loosing the eternal horses from the
dens of night’ is connected to the emancipation from the law-ridden doctrines
that have kept humans in the dark: the dispersal of the ‘clouds written with
curses’ and the destruction of the ‘stony law’ (pl. 27; E45).30 The unleashing of
an anti-moralistic theology echo the avowal of the speaker and the devil who
claim to publish a ‘Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will
or no’ (pl. 24; E44).
Another interesting Proverb of Hell is ‘The lust of the goat is the bounty
of God’ (pl.8; E36). ‘Goats’ was Swedenborg’s representation of the
‘Unrighteous’ who were placed in Hell (TCR n. 74), or, more specifically,
they are ‘Correspondences of the Affections’ of ‘those who had confirmed
themselves in the Doctrines of Justification by Faith alone’ (TCR n. 506). This was
another ‘correspondence’ Blake made use of in the paintings of 1809. In his
exhibition catalogue, he explains that the picture The Goats was inspired by
the ‘the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg’. The painting (now lost) is described
as showing how ‘savage girls had dressed themselves with vine leaves, and
some goats . . . stripped them off presently’ (E546). Blake’s use of
Swedenborg’s symbolic key was, also at this late date, playfully subversive.
It appears the ‘goats’ were, symbolically, removing the sense of bodily
shame, which was a result of human’s first disobedience, a shame covered up
with vine leaves.
At the beginning of the Marriage proper, on Plate 3, Blake’s denunciation
of the uselessness of Swedenborg’s writings leads directly into a criticism of
‘what the religious call Good & Evil’. According to Blake, religious moralisers
have pacified humanity with their claims that the ‘passive that obeys Reason’
is ‘Good’, whereas the ‘active’ that follows its natural ‘Energy’ is ‘calld Evil’.
On the following Plate 4, moralistic attempts to demonise bodily energies
are criticised. Blake here, sets up three propositions that summarise the
opinion of ‘All Bibles or sacred codes’, which are then corrected by
ROBERT W. RIX
119
‘The Voice of the Devil’ in three counter-statements. The first series of
propositions express orthodox fears of the body, according to which ‘God will
torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies’. Yet, the same ‘Energies’
are embraced by the ‘Devil’ as ‘Eternal Delight’ (pl. 4; E34). It seems to have
gone unnoticed that Blake’s corrective statements relate to Swedenborg’s
A Treatise on the Nature of Influx: or the Intercourse between the Soul and the Body.
Over the first pages of this work, Swedenborg outlines ‘Three different
Opinions or Hypotheses . . . to account for the Communication between
Soul and Body’. The tenor of Swedenborg’s argument can be grasped from
one of these statements: ‘the Soul being a spiritual Substance, and
consequently of greater Purity that the Body . . . it follows that it must have
the Pre-eminence and Influence over that which is more gross’.31
Readers familiar with Swedenborg’s works would surely have recognised
the source text Blake sets out to revise here. But it would be wrong to say that
the criticism is limited to Swedenborg; rather it is magnified to become an
attack on all ‘codes’ of religion that use the body/soul dualism to proscribe
the bodily energies. However, the accounts of the journeys to Heaven and
Hell on the following plates are written as focussed parodies on Swedenborg,
as we shall now see.
V I . M E M O R A B L E FA N C I E S
Blake re-names Swedenborg’s ‘Memorable Relations’ of what happened on
his visionary visits to the spiritual world as ‘Memorable Fancies’, thereby
debunking what had spiritual authority in the original. The events and
symbols of Blake’s ‘Memorable Fancies’ are close parodies of Swedenborg’s
True Christian Religion. Blake did not pick this work at random; it was
a book Swedenborg had published towards the end of his life to provide
an easy summary of his doctrines. Translated into English for the first time
in 1781, the English Swedenborgians used it as an introduction to prospective
converts.32
In the ‘Memorable Fancy’ on plates 17–20, the angel we meet here is an
orthodox believer in the Law. He passes judgment on the speaker for the
sinful life he has led: ‘O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful
state! consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all
eternity.’ However, Blake’s speaker courageously responds to the angel’s
charge with a wager: ‘perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot &
we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is
most desirable’ (pl. 17; E41). Subsequently, we are related two journeys, one
in which the angel shows the speaker the fate he will suffer in the spiritual
world as a consequence of his libertarian thinking, and another in which
120
IN INFERNAL LOVE AND FAITH
the speaker shows the angel the ‘eternal lot’ of his orthodox beliefs.
These journeys imitate both the form and purpose of Swedenborg’s
‘Memorable Relations’, in which it was documented how men of true faith
found their ‘lot’ in Heaven, whereas those who followed false doctrines were
doomed to hellish punishment.
On the first journey Blake describes, the angel drags the speaker
‘thro’ a stable & thro’ a church & down into the church vault at the end of
which was a mill: thro’ the mill we went . . . .’ The English translator of
True Christian Religion, John Clowes, explains in a footnote that the
‘spiritual Signification of the Words Mill and Grinding’ is ‘the collecting,
and preparing, from the Divine Word, Matter for Doctrine, or what is
serviceable to the Uses of spiritual life’.33 Blake shows how the
Swedenborgian angel bombards the speaker with a display of frightful
visions of the future he prepares for himself on account of his sinful beliefs.
Among other things, the angel shows the speaker his fate to be ‘between the
black & white spiders’, which recalls Swedenborg’s description of the
doctrines that corrupt Christianity as ‘Legions of Falsities, ready to burst into
Birth, like so many young Spiders from the Womb of a single Mother’
(TCR n. 178).
When the speaker flings himself ‘directly into the body of the sun’ and
clothes himself in white (pl. 19; E42), it refers to Swedenborg’s notion that
those spirits who have washed themselves of sins and evil by following the
Commandments of the Decalogue will put on white raiment (TCR n. 329,
435, 536, etc.). Here, they will enjoy the rays of the spiritual Sun, which is
how the Lord appears in Heaven. The irony is that the speaker here takes
in his hands ‘Swedenborgs volumes’ and sinks ‘from the glorious clime’.
This sinking away from the light of Heaven was precisely what Swedenborg
had described would happen to theologians who tried to enter here, carrying
misguided doctrines with them.
The series of events on plates 17–20 merge elements from Swedenborg’s
‘Memorable Relations’, in which antinomian theology is under attack.
In the ‘Memorable Relation’ of sections 387–89, Swedenborg recounts a visit
he had to a ‘wicked Society’ in the ‘lower Regions’ of Hell. Here resided
‘several Persons of Note and Distinction in the Church, who taught that man
is saved only by Faith in the Merits of Christ’ and that good works have no
relevance for ‘Salvation or Eternal Life’ (TCR n. 387–89). In their spiritual
form, these believers take the shape of ‘Dragons’, because they support those
false doctrines which in the Revelation of St John are symbolised as the
‘Dragon’. This seems to furnish Blake with his ‘Dragon-Man’ and ‘Dragons’
in the ‘Memorable Fancy’ on Plate 15.
Swedenborg tells us how he was led to the grand dome, where the
antinomian dragon-men would worship. This was an amphitheatre with
ROBERT W. RIX
121
‘Heifers, Rams, Sheep, Kids, and Lambs’, which, Swedenborg explains to the
reader, were ‘representative of the genuine Goods and Truths of the Church’.
Symbolically, these animals are brutally slaughtered by ‘Lions, Panthers,
Tigers, and Wolves’, which, in the spiritual world, represent impious ‘Lusts’
appear (n. 387). Blake refers to this passage when the angel scares the speaker
with the appearance of ‘the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from
corruption’ (pl. 18; E41).
While with the dragon-men, Swedenborg also observes the spectacle
of an enticing ‘Woman, cloathed in Scarlet Vest’, who holds a ‘Piece of
Gold Coin’ and a ‘Chain of Pearls’. However, he soon realizes that ‘both the
Image and the Place of Worship were the Effect of Phantasy’; an illusory
projection of the dragon-men’s brains. The woman is, in fact, the Harlot
described in Revelation, who symbolises the idolatrous community or the
apostate church. In turn, Swedenborg realizes that the dragon-man, who lured
him with this ‘Trick and Delusion’, is the ‘Enchanter’, whom St John
had prophesied would deceive the nations with false beliefs (Rev. 20.8–9).
This is parodied by Blake, who has the Swedenborgian angel address to
the speaker: ‘thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be
ashamed’ (pl. 20; E42).
In Swedenborg’s vision, the illusion of the Harlot finally disappears to reveal
her true identity as the Leviathan—the allegorical embodiment of Antichrist.
The biblical monster signifies antinomian beliefs. Section 389 is an account
of how Swedenborg observed ‘a Roll of Paper, sent down from Heaven’
with a warning to all antinomian believers to mend their ways. Yet, despite
this warning, ‘a Monster’ rises ‘out of the Earth. . . exactly resembling the
Beast described in the Revelation, xiii. 1, 2’, which spread the message of
‘Faith Alone Justifying’ all over the Earth’.34 In the campaign to purge
the New Jerusalem Church of antinomian beliefs, this ‘Memorable Relation’
was taken up in one the Swedenborgian journals published around the time
Blake was affiliated with the Church. The commentator explains that
‘Leviathan in the Revelation, Chap. xii. the Dragon is so called’ signifies those
‘who espouse justification by faith alone’.35
Blake’s ‘Memorable Fancy’ satirises the same passage. The angel shows the
speaker (who we must understand as a champion of antinomianism) the image
of his faith as it appears in the spiritual world; this is as ‘monstrous serpent . . . .
Leviathan’. Yet, it is a reversal of Swedenborg’s vision, for Leviathan here
appears to have been a figment of the angel’s mind, and the speaker is
left to indulge in the pleasant delights of ‘a harper who sung to the harp’.
Blake’s satirical strategy is here to re-direct Swedenborg’s own formulations
so they work against him. The prophet had criticised the old churches for
being ‘like stagnant Water, which by Degrees groweth putrid and stinketh’
(TCR n. 756). This is echoed at the end of this ‘Memorable Fancy’
122
IN INFERNAL LOVE AND FAITH
in the speaker’s indictment of the Swedenborgian angel: ‘The man who
never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind’
(pl. 19; E42).
There is also satire of Swedenborg to be found in Blake’s ‘Memorable
Fancy’ on Plate 15. Here, the Dragons inhabit a cave, which functions as
a ‘Printing house in Hell’. The speaker observes how metals are melted
into casts for the printing of books with subversive wisdom. This work
(which remind us more than a little of Blake’s own work with etchings
on copper plates, which was also used for the Marriage) is undertaken by
‘lions of flaming fire’. Lions, like tigers, are among Swedenborg’s
fixed ‘correspondences’ for the ‘Sins . . . retained in an unrepentant Person’
(TCR n. 524).
Blake’s infernal ‘cave’ with its various ‘departments’ resembles
Swedenborg’s analogy of the human mind as a building with floors, in
which those who sin against the Commandments are at the bottom
(TCR n. 296). But in making the cavern a printing house, Blake may
specifically recall Swedenborg’s description of a house in Hell with many
‘Apartments, divided into small Cells in which copyists are ‘collecting and
transcribing’ from Scripture ‘Proofs of in Favour of Justification by Faith
Alone’ (TCR n. 505). At least, this scenario of the copyists is depicted by Blake
in the illustration on Plate 10, which shows a devil dictating from a scroll
to two scribes.
V I I. C O N C LU S I O N
On Plate 3, Blake calls for Swedenborg’s ‘writings’ to be ‘folded up’ and
abandoned (E34). Blake announces that ‘a new heaven is begun’, which
is clearly the antithesis of the ‘Heaven’ of law-abiding angels Swedenborg
had described. Instead, Blake associates his ‘new heaven’ with the revival of
‘the Eternal Hell’, i.e. the liberty of bodily, religious, and psychological
energies. It has been the aim of the above to show that a significant part of
Blake’s satire on Swedenborg in the Marriage was compelled by the prophet’s
hostile views on justification by faith alone. It does not mean, however, that we
can close the case on Blake and the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church.
There were likely a number of different factors that provoked Blake to leave.
Neither is the above an attempt to read the Marriage exclusively as an
antinomian manifesto. If Swedenborg’s religious legalism was Blake’s original
impulse for commencing the satire, the final work takes up a number of
adjacent discourses that may use the form of Swedenborg’s ‘Memorable
Relations’, but are not directly aimed at Swedenborg. On the first plate
Blake etched for the work (pl. 21), he noted that Swedenborg had ‘written
ROBERT W. RIX
123
all the old falshoods’. As the work expanded from an initial set of four to
the final twenty-seven plates, the Marriage was reconceived as a general
criticism of ‘All Bibles or sacred codes’ that inhibits and deters one
from action.
Department of English, Germanic and Romance Languages, University of
Copenhagen, Njalsgade 130, DK-2300 Copenhagen, Denmark
[email protected]
REFERENCES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
G.E. Bentley, Blake Records, 2nd edn
(New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2004), p. 35.
T.S. Eliot, ‘William Blake’, Selected Essays
(London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p. 32.
Swedenborg’s
cultural
influence
is
traced in Alfred J. Gabay, The Covert
Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Counterculture and its Aftermath (West Chester,
Penn.: Swedenborg Foundation Publishers,
2005).
To help Swedenborgian readers along,
glossaries were published, such as James
Hindmarsh’s A New Dictionary of Correspondences, Representations, etc.; or the spiritual
significations of words, sentences, etc. as
used in the Sacred Scriptures. Compiled
from the theological writings of the
Hon. Emanuel Swedenborg (London:
R. Hindmarsh, 1794).
See Marguerite Beck Block, The New
Church in the New World (1932; New York:
Swedenborg Publishing Association, 1984),
pp. 52–72.
The words are from a review in The
Conjuror’s Magazine (November 1791)
p. 130.
Morton Paley, ‘‘‘A New Heaven is
Begun’’: William Blake and Swedenborgianism’, Blake; and Illustrated Quarterly 13
(2) (1979) 65–67.
Joseph Viscomi, ‘The Evolution of Blake’s
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Huntington
Library Quarterly 58 (1997) 281–344;
‘Lessons of Swedenborg; or, the Origin of
9
10
11
12
13
Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in
Robert Gleckner and Thomas Pfau (eds.),
Lessons of Romanticism (Durham NC, Duke
University Press, 1998), pp. 173–212; and
‘In the Caves of Heaven and Hell:
Swedenborg and Printmaking in Blake’s
Marriage’ in Steve Clark and David
Worrall (eds.), Blake in the Nineties
(London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 27–61.
See Viscomi, ‘Evolution’, pp. 314–22.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William
Blake, David V. Erdman (ed.), rev. edn.
(New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 34. All
subsequent references to Blake’s writings
are to this edition and will be cited
parenthically in the text as ‘E.’ Plate
number and verse lines are indicated when
applicable.
A.L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel
(London: Lawrence & Wisehart, 1958).
E.P. Thompson, Witness against the
Beast: William Blake and Moral Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 12–14.
Documentation on Blake’s mother in the
Fetter Lane Society exists for 1751–52,
see Keri Davies and Marsha Keith
Schuchard,
‘Recovering
the
Lost
Moravian History of William Blake’s
Family’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly
38(1) (2004) 36–43. For the antinomian
aspect among the English Moravians, see
Colin Podmore, The Moravian Church in
England, "ÇÆ–"Ç (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998), pp. 11–13.
124
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
IN INFERNAL LOVE AND FAITH
Emanuel Swedenborg, The True Christian
Religion, containing the Universal Theology of
the New Church, trans. John Clowes, 2 vols.
(London: J. Phillips et al., 1781), n. 283.
All future references will be cited
parenthically in the text as TCR. By
convention, they will be marked with ‘n’
for section number.
Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William
Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the
"Çæs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),
pp. 59–60; and ‘Is there an Antinomian
in the House? William Blake and the
After-Life of a Heresy,’in Steve Clark and
David Worrall (eds.), Historicizing Blake
(London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 43–58.
Christopher Hill, Liberty against the Law:
Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies
(London: Allen Lane, 1996), pp. 214–26,
328–29.
For a general overview of these ideas in the
seventeenth century and their parallels
in Blake’s writing, see Christopher Hill,
The World Turned Up-Side Down: Radical
Ideas during the English Revolution (London:
Temple Smith, 1972), pp. 121–47.
Emanuel Swedenborg, The Wisdom
of Angels concerning Divine Love and Divine
Wisdom (London: W. Chalken, 1788),
[British Library, shelfmark C.45.e.1]
n. 333.
Emanuel
Swedenborg,
A
Treatise
Concerning Heaven and Hell and of the
Wonderful Things Within, 2nd edn
(London: R. Hindmarsh, 1784), n. 525.
See the hostile annotations to Bishop
Richard Watson’s An Apology for the Bible
(1797), esp. E614. For the Church and its
religious justifications of the war, see
Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics, and Public
Order in England "Ç–"Æ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989),
pp. 149–53.
Carl Th. Odhner, Robert Hindmarsh
(Philadelphia, 1895), pp. Æ–; Charles
Higham, ‘Mislaid Notebooks’, New Church
Magazine (1917) 431–32, 511–19 and
559–66.
Thompson, Witness, pp. 162–67.
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
‘An Account of the First General
Conference of the Members of the New
Jerusalem Church, London, 1789’, repr.
in Harvey Bellin and Darrel Ruhl (eds.),
Blake and Swedenborg: Opposition is True
Friendship (New York: Swedenborg
Foundation, 1985), p. 122.
Rev. Mr. Bradshaw, A Scourge for the
Dissenters; or, Non-Conformity Unm asked
(London: printed for the author, 1790),
pp. 51–52.
William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and
Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this
Metropolis (London: J. Hatchhart, 1800),
pp. 52–53.
For Reid’s career, see Iain McCalman,
‘The Infidel Prophet: William Reid and
Blakean Radicalism,’ in Historicizing
Blake, pp. 24–42.
For some of the Swedenborgian references, see Martin K. Nurmi, Blake’s
Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A Critical
Study (New York: Kent State University
Bulletin, 1957), p. 17.
Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, n. 311.
Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, n. 571.
Blake’s ‘Song’ draws heavily on
Revelations, and we are therefore
reminded of the horses in chapter 6. Yet,
it is interesting to read the linking of
antinomian doctrine and the unleashing
of the horses here with Swedenborg’s
reading of ‘horses’ in the same book.
In TCR n. 113, the prophet describes
a vision of men, who in their youth
‘had learned to believe in Faith alone’ and
now, at Armageddon, were mounted
on horses to battle those of true faith.
Yet, they hold back their ‘horses’, because
they fear that fighting would reveal
the erroneousness of their doctrines to all
mankind.
Emanuel Swedenborg, A Treatise on the
Nature of Influx: or the Intercourse
between the Soul and the Body, 3rd edn
(London: R. Hindmarsh, 1788), p. xli.
The founder of the New Jerusalem
Church propagandised it as ‘recommended
to the perusal of all who wish to get a
ROBERT W. RIX
33
general idea of the contents of the
preceding books’, see Robert Hindmarsh,
A Short Account of the Honourable Emanuel
Swedenborg, and his Theological Writings
(London; re-printed Baltimore, 1792),
p. 31.
Note to n. 161, TCR 1: 225.
34
35
125
Cf. n. 810, in which a number of preachers
who discourse on ‘faith alone’ see ‘a
monster above and a serpent below’,
which is a projection of their religious
corruption.
The New Magazine of Knowledge, April
(1790), p. 77.