Though I missed class on Wednesday, I would like to talk a bit about Blake’s connections to the Moravian Church. While I’ll be avoiding the highly sexualized undertones of the “diminuitive terms of endearment” and all this business about “the last Kiss” and the Church as the “eternal Bridegroom,” I shall not fail to search for these kinds of references in my future engagement with Blake’s work (much the same as my habit of thinking of nun’s as being Christ’s earthly girlfriends… I once read a comic strip that conjectured that perhaps Jesus wouldn’t return to earth out of fear of his perhaps millions of sexually frustrated suitors who’ve been waiting patiently in their convents for centuries, but perhaps we can save that for another time…) No, I want to focus on those aspects of Moravian theology that can be easily found in his work, both in the the particular manifestations we find in a given piece, as well as the essence of his œuvre en générale.
In Zinzendorf’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Ludwig_Zinzendorf) reading of the Bible, the idea of Christ as the husband of his earthly Bridegroom, the Church (and by extension, presumably, the individual members therein) takes such a precedence that it thematizes the very way the Moravian Church refers to their Savior and their relation to him. This is where the sensual language (like the “last Kiss”) comes from. The Moravians, themselves, did all they could to maintain a childlike demeanor by “playing games and developing a secret language…” While their desire to appear childlike in the face of a sexualized savior seems quite troublesome, let it suffice to say that this search for youth and simplicity resonates strongly in Blake’s work. Recall “The Ecchoing Green” in which these very themes are explored. Now consider the whole of The Songs of Innocence and Experience. In Blake’s world of contraries, youth may have its appeal, innocence and the pastoral idyll are well characterized in Innocence, but age and experience provide an individual with a fuller understanding of the self and the world in which it resides.
I could go for longer, but I want to utilize the comments section to see where these ideas are leading you, dear reader. For now, I wait, as so many nuns before me.
Tag Archive: Moravian Church
I find it quite ironic that Moravian spirituality centralized sexual experimentation, most especially during the Sifting Time, while simultaneously placing much emphasis on female figures, principally the mother,and “aiming to become ever more childlike and simple” (Podmore, 132). While it is obvious that sexual desire and passion precede motherhood and that these two feelings enter the vein of childhood during the end stages of innocence, it baffles me that these wholly divergent facets are upheld and revered so equitably. Herein lies an intermingling of contraries that perhaps aims to reach followers at different stages of development, maturity, and, dare I say, corruption (i.e. experience). Perhaps this is the Moravian Church’s goal: to provide such a broad and accepting platform and appeal to a larger audience that otherwise may have been ousted or stigmatized by other churches whose dogmas were strict and were what we may in modern times deem “stringently conservative.” I’d like to focus for a moment more intently on the importance of female figures and the influence of the mother. Blake’s very upbringing echoes this aspect of the Moravian religion in that his mother, Catherine Wright Armitage, was a faithful Moravian along with her first husband, Thomas Armitage. Blake’s connection to the religion and its values is tied to the fact that a devout Moravian reared him. The mimetic quality of a child’s religious and moral beliefs during the period of innocence definitely exposed Blake to the sexually explicit and viscerally energetic Moravian religion. His transition to form his own religion or, arguably, a religion-less world in which each individual seeks his/ own Poetic Genius through artistic expression and self exploration, fastens Blake firmly in the world of Experience described in his “Songs.”
