The Devil is a Good Christian!?

At their cores Paine and Blake are two revolutionaries displeased with the system they live in, particularly the state and church. And to Blake turning against the rigidity of orthodox religion does not preclude you from being Christian in any way, and in fact seems to find it makes you MORE Christian. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake emphasizes the importance of contraries, and seems to do so again when he describes Paine. As Blake says “(Paine is) either a Devil or an Inspired Man” a seemingly binary comparison, but it takes on a whole new level of meaning when we remember that Blake thinks many answers are not found by consulting angels, but devils. So this statement comes off more as a statement questioning if Paine is a Devil or a Man but that either way he is inspired and “a better Christian than the Bishop”.

Paine and Blake are very different people, despite a some major ideological similarities. But If there is one thing we can glean from pretty much everything Blake has ever written or created its that he loves contraries. To embrace contraries, question the system so you can progress and innovate is the core of Blakes philosophy. So it does not surprise me that he seems to deeply respect a radical person that questions everything about the system such as Paine, even if he may not agree with every philosophy. After all, many times through out his work Blake consults not with the Church or Angels but with Devils.

-Tanner Fleckenstein

Liberté, égalité, fraternité

Blake’s marginalia deeming Paine “either a Devil or an Inspired Man” (456) is indicative of his admiration for Pain because throughout the works of Blake we see him develop the devil as a character that is calling for inquiry on a system that he is advised to not question. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell “the voice of the devil” raises 6 points that expose “the errors of sacred codes”. For Paine to be compared to a devil or an Inspired Man is self-referential to the Poetic Genius.

Blake’s engagement to the French revolution is exemplified by the line: “To what does the Bishop attribute the English Crusade against France, it is not to State Religion, blush for shame” (456). Blake is also against the monarchy and, ultimately, the church.

Several texts we’ve read so far from Blake realign with ideas such as Paine’s. In Paine’s “Common Sense” we encounter a radical thinker that contrasts the “evils” of government with the “blessing” of society. The government he’s referring to is the aristocracy that he refuses to endorse since he does not believe that old generations should impose their will on newer generations because of birth-right. This idea realigns with Blake’s idea that the individual (or society) is not wicked, but the church (or the government) is wicked.

Paine also mentions America in his text as the model for democracy: “What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude: the one was the wonder of the ancient world, the other is becoming the admiration, the model of the present” (27). In Blake’s artwork “America a Prophecy”, he also depicts America in a mystical form, showing his mythological figures, including “Albions Angel”, “Londons Guardian” (forces of the British government), Urizen, and fiery Orc (the spirit of revolt). In his other artwork “Europe a prophecy” he is depicting Europe as treacherous by using the snake, which is a biblical symbol of evil. These illustrations could also align with Paine’s emphasis on a republic in which the people choose the ruler, as depicted in Blake’s artwork where the Europe illustration has only one snake (wearing a crown), and it’s tremendous size prevents room for anyone else.

-Beyanira Bautista

Chained by the Giant

Blake’s disagreements with the system of the Royal Academy was greatly influenced by his mother, who was before influenced by Zinzendorf, bishop of the Moravian Church. Zinzendorf strongly advocated a healthy mother-child relationship and Blake later incorporates themes of a mother-child relationship in many of his works. Zinzendorf’s childhood of being sent away to boarding school and instructed by puritanical pedants took part in this concept that “mother was the best teacher for a young child” (Schuchard 89).

The obsession with women dealt with their anatomical features, specifically, the breasts, which is symbolic of not only nursing a child, but also the passing of knowledge to child. The “Moravians advocated maternal breast feeding rather than farming infants out to wet nurses” because “the mother’s “school” for her infant took on a spiritualerotic connotation, which was vividly expressed in hymns for the embryo and suckling choirs” (89). This is the supposedly more natural form of education.

Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell describes his experience in a printing house in Hell. He witnesses and describes the process of book printing through images of creatures molding rubble together. He says, “There they were reciev’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries” (Blake 76). Both Blake and Zinzendorf saw institutional training as artificial and evil. There is no definitive answers to Blake’s Christianity because priesthood and the church are their own forms of institution. Blake, as a Moravian, sees the contradictions within Moravian itself. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell points to Zinzendorf and calls him out for this reason. Institutions such as the Royal Academy are:

The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth, the causes of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are the cunning of the weak and tame minds, which have the power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning” (76).

Is the priest, the church, and/or religion members of these Giants that Blake has mentioned above?

-Van Vang