Very informative and entertaining lecture! I liked the emphasis on the many legacies of Blake at the start. As you might have guessed, my interest lies mainly in his influence on New Age spiritual beliefs.
You repeatedly referred to Blake as gnostic. I have difficulty with this term (guess I’ll have to read Bloom). Sure, Blake criticised orthodox beliefs of the idea of a Creator God. But he elevated the Hebrew Bible above Greek philosophy - the opposite of Weil. From my understanding, his system is closer to the Kabbalah than to historical Gnosticism. The Tree of Life is a step beyond “the flesh is a prison” and I don’t think it is useful to refer to both as ‘gnosticism’, especially as these are opposing forces on the mental battlefields of neopagan spaces (not unlike early Christianity). Or am I just nitpicking?
My use of the word gnostic was definitely casual. There's scholarly and critical debate about how much Blake can or should be associated with various traditions, including gnosticism, Kabbalah, and the general "occult." Frye, for example, insisted that he wasn't occult, and he did seem to reject things like astrology. Chesterton (pejoratively) called him a gnostic outright, but that may have been Catholic prejudice talking! In her book on gnosticism, Elaine Pagels just casually includes him without argument in her list of modern gnostics.
I think his against-the-grain reading of the Bible, where the God of the early books is actually a demiurge (i.e., Urizen), is mainly what I had in mind, along with a contempt for the material world that seems to grow as his work goes on. But his theory of "states" does seem more Kabbalistic than strictly dualist. In short, it's a difficult question, made more difficult by the general obscurity of his later work.
There’s always a bit of self-regard nestled in statements like this, but I do think that Blake is one of the reasons I started writing and reading more seriously around the age of 12 (happening upon what I assume was a college anthology in the otherwise neglected “serious” part of my parents’ bookcase). The section in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell asserting “the ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses” was hairs-on-your-neck strong medicine for an Episcopalian growing up in genteel poverty surrounded by paranoid and censorious Evangelicals (of course a hilarious reversal of Blake’s Protestant/Anglican circumstances — our little chapel was literally in the shadow of the white stucco mega-church of the denomination that wants Kevin Bacon to stop dancing in Footloose).
I, too, was drawn to this question that Gnocchic and mary jane put forward (I scribbled in several places “Gnostic or not?”) because I was thinking back to an episode of the Grand Hotel Abyss podcast where John and Sam were discussing the neo-right’s (then? or still?) tendency to ascribe “gnostic” origins to various woke tendencies. Anyway, “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age” would seem to militate against the notion of gnostic views as dualistic or against the body or material world. But it *does* feel gnostic to me in the Nag Hammadi/Elaine Pagels sense. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (being a sayings gospel, lacking narrative) has this same feel; gnomic, koans, these provocations of normative assumptions about morality (“Drive your plow over the bones of the dead” in Blake — “If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves; and if you pray, you will be condemned; and if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits” in said gospel.)
What actually strikes me the most about re-encountering Blake is how sensitive to and appalled he is at the treatment of children in early Industrial London. It’s probably difficult for us to accurately picture the sheer volume of child labor you would encounter in a casual stroll around the city of that time…
P.S. someone should start a high-end streetwear line with ad copy like “the lineaments of gratified desire” or “hungry clouds swag on the deep”
Yes, I wish I'd paid more attention to the urban social Blake, read "London" at least, but maybe I'll work my way back once we get to Dickens or Shaw, who share his spirit in this respect.
My sense, which I derive largely from Alice Ostriker's feminist essay in the Norton Critical Edition of Blake, is that his work changes over the almost 30 years he was writing poetry to become more and more hostile to the natural world, women, etc. (I quote Ostriker in my Blake essay on the main site.) So his "gnosticism" might be a moving target. His early work is very Gospel of Thomas, I agree, but the later work is more like the more mythological Nag Hammadi material, just in formal terms. As for "woke," I think there's something proto-woke in "I come to wash off the not human," an ambition I find beautiful and threatening in equal measure.
Lol I also found a college anthology at the age of 12 that inspired more serious reading; I got it from a library book sale. But I couldn't make much out of the Blake in there other than "The Tiger"—it was all from Songs of Innocence and Experience, which might have been paradoxically too simple for a beginning reader who expected the serious to look more, well, serious—and I only had eyes for Eliot and Keats and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." I was already deep in my adolescent atheist phase by then, rebelling against Catholic school, spurred by science fiction, which the poets if anything began to moderate.
Blake fashion—if I ever do merch, which I won't...
Fascinating lecture, an auspicious beginning to the Invisible College! I haven't read as much Blake as you might imagine, but I clearly need to investigate further. Some thoughts: the vision of the primordial Albion seems more Hermetic or more related to strands of early Christianity (Origen, some of Gregory of Nyssa, etc) than Gnostic, but on the other hand speaking of gnosticism, someone else who was supposed to have been both a great visual artist and a great writer (as well as conversing with angels in the trees) was Mani, the founder of Manichaeism. I don't think anything of his work survived but oh well
Thanks! I'm pretty sure, though I'm not up on the most recent scholarship, that we're not certain what Blake read or knew beyond what he obviously alludes to or wrote directly about, and Frye made it sound like he probably had "research" methods similar to my own. The sole reference to Hermes Trismegistus in Fearful Symmetry asserts with a reference to some letter of Blake's I haven't read that he grouped him with Newton, Locke, etc., for "supposing up and down to be the same thing, as all experimentalists must suppose."
Yes it’s so hard to know, and the thing about Gnosticism/catharism/bogomilism is that as you point out there really are shades of it in the Christian sacred texts and even the most normative churches, and it does keep being reinvented thriving the history of Christendom. Honestly I even sometimes think considering it and what remains of it that Manichaeasm seems to have something of the nineteenth and twentieth century
western usage/mangling of Buddhism and Hinduism to it!
Right I think it's an irrepressible current of human thought, as is the reaction against it. I'm reading Wordsworth now, and even though he's duller than Blake he's also more comforting in his often convincingly serene sense that nature and human consciousness were made for each other. (Paglia, however, jeers him as a "mental transsexual," to hark back to our comments under my last Weekly Reading.)
Given how much Buddhism and Hinduism entered the west through Theosophy and similar currents, your last point is persuasive; on the other hand, I've seen gnostic types claim that Christ must have encountered Buddhism! Blake, apparently, had read the Bhagavad Gita.
I’ve seen relatively orthodox types speculate about Buddhism-Christ connections, and there’s a persistent question about connections between Hinduism and Neoplatonism-Persia and Afghanistan were incredibly cosmopolitan in late antiquity- as you were saying last week and today these things repeat endlessly. Re:Paglia I sometimes think the superficially anti-Gnostic anti-gender people in our own time wind up more Gnostic than the supposedly “Gnostic transgenderism” because they wind up in their own way rejecting nature & the body.
Yo teach! Sorry I missed a few classes, is there any extra credit?
I’ll admit I listened to this only having read the poems included in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language rather than all the ones on the syllabus. Nothing in it made me want to continue Songs of Innocence and Experience, but is there much to get out of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell without knowing anything about Swedenborg? Is the countercultural free love Blake ever reconciled with the Blake that wants us to toss out the influence of the Romans and Greeks and embrace the God of early Judaism?
Lol no problem! Marriage of Heaven and Hell is my favorite thing by Blake, plus it's short, so I recommend it. I've read about Swedenborg but never read him directly; don't think it's necessary. The countercultural free love Blake is in his early work, the more severe and moralistic Blake is apparently in the later long prophetic books no one can read or understand (those who claim to understand it will say I have this all wrong).
Well anything you don’t understand I’m not even going to try to attempt. Interesting though that more a man known as a poet, your favorite work of his is prose. His early poetry for me is a little too sweet, not necessarily the content, but the rhythm. It all feels very story book. Maybe even twee. And after this lecture, learning it’s not just me, and though I do appreciate his attempt to show the limits of innocence, I debate between diving deeper into him or moving onto Wordsworth for the next lecture. I hope one of these poets will capture me like Moby Dick or the great prose stylists of the 20th Century. It feels odd to enjoy such poetic prose but not to have a favorite poet, or even a favorite poem.
Update: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is indeed worth reading, and in a way that will make me take a second look at his other early poetry. Preferably illustrated, as my sense is that he was not so committed to traditional form as he was to overall vision which his drawings are an essential part of.
Thank you for the wonderful lecture John. I knew nothing about blake so this was very enlightening on several levels. As someone who went to Presbyterian private school in Australia I sung that hymn Jerusalem a LOT and had no idea what it meant of how it had been 'revolutionised'. Looking forward to the next lecture!
Very informative and entertaining lecture! I liked the emphasis on the many legacies of Blake at the start. As you might have guessed, my interest lies mainly in his influence on New Age spiritual beliefs.
You repeatedly referred to Blake as gnostic. I have difficulty with this term (guess I’ll have to read Bloom). Sure, Blake criticised orthodox beliefs of the idea of a Creator God. But he elevated the Hebrew Bible above Greek philosophy - the opposite of Weil. From my understanding, his system is closer to the Kabbalah than to historical Gnosticism. The Tree of Life is a step beyond “the flesh is a prison” and I don’t think it is useful to refer to both as ‘gnosticism’, especially as these are opposing forces on the mental battlefields of neopagan spaces (not unlike early Christianity). Or am I just nitpicking?
Thanks for listening—glad you enjoyed it!
My use of the word gnostic was definitely casual. There's scholarly and critical debate about how much Blake can or should be associated with various traditions, including gnosticism, Kabbalah, and the general "occult." Frye, for example, insisted that he wasn't occult, and he did seem to reject things like astrology. Chesterton (pejoratively) called him a gnostic outright, but that may have been Catholic prejudice talking! In her book on gnosticism, Elaine Pagels just casually includes him without argument in her list of modern gnostics.
I think his against-the-grain reading of the Bible, where the God of the early books is actually a demiurge (i.e., Urizen), is mainly what I had in mind, along with a contempt for the material world that seems to grow as his work goes on. But his theory of "states" does seem more Kabbalistic than strictly dualist. In short, it's a difficult question, made more difficult by the general obscurity of his later work.
There’s always a bit of self-regard nestled in statements like this, but I do think that Blake is one of the reasons I started writing and reading more seriously around the age of 12 (happening upon what I assume was a college anthology in the otherwise neglected “serious” part of my parents’ bookcase). The section in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell asserting “the ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses” was hairs-on-your-neck strong medicine for an Episcopalian growing up in genteel poverty surrounded by paranoid and censorious Evangelicals (of course a hilarious reversal of Blake’s Protestant/Anglican circumstances — our little chapel was literally in the shadow of the white stucco mega-church of the denomination that wants Kevin Bacon to stop dancing in Footloose).
I, too, was drawn to this question that Gnocchic and mary jane put forward (I scribbled in several places “Gnostic or not?”) because I was thinking back to an episode of the Grand Hotel Abyss podcast where John and Sam were discussing the neo-right’s (then? or still?) tendency to ascribe “gnostic” origins to various woke tendencies. Anyway, “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age” would seem to militate against the notion of gnostic views as dualistic or against the body or material world. But it *does* feel gnostic to me in the Nag Hammadi/Elaine Pagels sense. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (being a sayings gospel, lacking narrative) has this same feel; gnomic, koans, these provocations of normative assumptions about morality (“Drive your plow over the bones of the dead” in Blake — “If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves; and if you pray, you will be condemned; and if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits” in said gospel.)
What actually strikes me the most about re-encountering Blake is how sensitive to and appalled he is at the treatment of children in early Industrial London. It’s probably difficult for us to accurately picture the sheer volume of child labor you would encounter in a casual stroll around the city of that time…
P.S. someone should start a high-end streetwear line with ad copy like “the lineaments of gratified desire” or “hungry clouds swag on the deep”
Yes, I wish I'd paid more attention to the urban social Blake, read "London" at least, but maybe I'll work my way back once we get to Dickens or Shaw, who share his spirit in this respect.
My sense, which I derive largely from Alice Ostriker's feminist essay in the Norton Critical Edition of Blake, is that his work changes over the almost 30 years he was writing poetry to become more and more hostile to the natural world, women, etc. (I quote Ostriker in my Blake essay on the main site.) So his "gnosticism" might be a moving target. His early work is very Gospel of Thomas, I agree, but the later work is more like the more mythological Nag Hammadi material, just in formal terms. As for "woke," I think there's something proto-woke in "I come to wash off the not human," an ambition I find beautiful and threatening in equal measure.
Lol I also found a college anthology at the age of 12 that inspired more serious reading; I got it from a library book sale. But I couldn't make much out of the Blake in there other than "The Tiger"—it was all from Songs of Innocence and Experience, which might have been paradoxically too simple for a beginning reader who expected the serious to look more, well, serious—and I only had eyes for Eliot and Keats and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." I was already deep in my adolescent atheist phase by then, rebelling against Catholic school, spurred by science fiction, which the poets if anything began to moderate.
Blake fashion—if I ever do merch, which I won't...
Fascinating lecture, an auspicious beginning to the Invisible College! I haven't read as much Blake as you might imagine, but I clearly need to investigate further. Some thoughts: the vision of the primordial Albion seems more Hermetic or more related to strands of early Christianity (Origen, some of Gregory of Nyssa, etc) than Gnostic, but on the other hand speaking of gnosticism, someone else who was supposed to have been both a great visual artist and a great writer (as well as conversing with angels in the trees) was Mani, the founder of Manichaeism. I don't think anything of his work survived but oh well
Thanks! I'm pretty sure, though I'm not up on the most recent scholarship, that we're not certain what Blake read or knew beyond what he obviously alludes to or wrote directly about, and Frye made it sound like he probably had "research" methods similar to my own. The sole reference to Hermes Trismegistus in Fearful Symmetry asserts with a reference to some letter of Blake's I haven't read that he grouped him with Newton, Locke, etc., for "supposing up and down to be the same thing, as all experimentalists must suppose."
Yes it’s so hard to know, and the thing about Gnosticism/catharism/bogomilism is that as you point out there really are shades of it in the Christian sacred texts and even the most normative churches, and it does keep being reinvented thriving the history of Christendom. Honestly I even sometimes think considering it and what remains of it that Manichaeasm seems to have something of the nineteenth and twentieth century
western usage/mangling of Buddhism and Hinduism to it!
Right I think it's an irrepressible current of human thought, as is the reaction against it. I'm reading Wordsworth now, and even though he's duller than Blake he's also more comforting in his often convincingly serene sense that nature and human consciousness were made for each other. (Paglia, however, jeers him as a "mental transsexual," to hark back to our comments under my last Weekly Reading.)
Given how much Buddhism and Hinduism entered the west through Theosophy and similar currents, your last point is persuasive; on the other hand, I've seen gnostic types claim that Christ must have encountered Buddhism! Blake, apparently, had read the Bhagavad Gita.
I’ve seen relatively orthodox types speculate about Buddhism-Christ connections, and there’s a persistent question about connections between Hinduism and Neoplatonism-Persia and Afghanistan were incredibly cosmopolitan in late antiquity- as you were saying last week and today these things repeat endlessly. Re:Paglia I sometimes think the superficially anti-Gnostic anti-gender people in our own time wind up more Gnostic than the supposedly “Gnostic transgenderism” because they wind up in their own way rejecting nature & the body.
Yo teach! Sorry I missed a few classes, is there any extra credit?
I’ll admit I listened to this only having read the poems included in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language rather than all the ones on the syllabus. Nothing in it made me want to continue Songs of Innocence and Experience, but is there much to get out of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell without knowing anything about Swedenborg? Is the countercultural free love Blake ever reconciled with the Blake that wants us to toss out the influence of the Romans and Greeks and embrace the God of early Judaism?
Lol no problem! Marriage of Heaven and Hell is my favorite thing by Blake, plus it's short, so I recommend it. I've read about Swedenborg but never read him directly; don't think it's necessary. The countercultural free love Blake is in his early work, the more severe and moralistic Blake is apparently in the later long prophetic books no one can read or understand (those who claim to understand it will say I have this all wrong).
Well anything you don’t understand I’m not even going to try to attempt. Interesting though that more a man known as a poet, your favorite work of his is prose. His early poetry for me is a little too sweet, not necessarily the content, but the rhythm. It all feels very story book. Maybe even twee. And after this lecture, learning it’s not just me, and though I do appreciate his attempt to show the limits of innocence, I debate between diving deeper into him or moving onto Wordsworth for the next lecture. I hope one of these poets will capture me like Moby Dick or the great prose stylists of the 20th Century. It feels odd to enjoy such poetic prose but not to have a favorite poet, or even a favorite poem.
Update: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is indeed worth reading, and in a way that will make me take a second look at his other early poetry. Preferably illustrated, as my sense is that he was not so committed to traditional form as he was to overall vision which his drawings are an essential part of.
Thank you for the wonderful lecture John. I knew nothing about blake so this was very enlightening on several levels. As someone who went to Presbyterian private school in Australia I sung that hymn Jerusalem a LOT and had no idea what it meant of how it had been 'revolutionised'. Looking forward to the next lecture!
You're welcome—so glad you enjoyed it!