by David M. Baulch
[Baulch, David M. "The Sublime of the Bible." Romanticism On the Net 3
(August 1996)
<http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/sublime.html>]
The reason why Blake removed the preface to Milton , which includes
his most famous lyric, commonly known as
"Jerusalem," is unclear. (1) But beyond whatever reservations Blake
may have had about the "Preface" after he'd finished and
sold the first two copes of Milton , it offers a useful insight into
the Blakean sublime. Milton is the work where Blake presents
the experience of the infinite within the finite through its embedded
concentric narratives which reveal the apparently linear
proceedings--as one's experience of a poem must proceed, page-by-page
in time--as a single visionary instant for Blake as
narrator of the poem in his Felpham garden. For Blake this experience
is the instantaneous apprehension of the Divine Vision as
a presence generated by the imagination by means of a textual model
of aesthetic experience. With the Divine Vision as the
realization of this aesthetic experience, Blake's reading of the Bible
becomes a critical component in identifying his construction
of sublimity. My specific concern here is to determine what Blake means
by the phrase "the Sublime of the Bible" in Milton .
The polemical preface begins by making the claim that "The Stolen and
Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato &
Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn: are set up by artifice against
the Sublime of the Bible". (2) As a writer in the early
nineteenth century Blake's view the Bible as an exemplar of the sublime
is hardly unusual. However, as Vincent De Luca
observes, it is unusual that Blake's idea of a literary tradition of
sublimity excludes the "mighty poetic names both classical and
modern, including Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton". (3) Blake scholars
have tried to account for this unusual view of the
sublime in terms of potential sources from which he might have drawn
to formulate his idea. The most persuasive argument
about potential influences on Blake's concept of sublimity is advanced
by Morton Paley and further developed by De Luca
concerning Robert Lowth's Lectures on The Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews
. (4) Lowth's Lectures were published by
Blake's sometimes friend and employer Joseph Johnson in 1787; thus,
it is possible that Blake was aware of Lowth's work.
Lowth argues that Hebrew poetry produces the sublime feeling by means
of its use of parallel syntax and a highly formal
organization in the structuring of its lines. While there are numerous
instances of this kind of arrangement in Blake's major
prophecies, there is no concrete evidence that he actually read or
took any significant interest in Lowth's work.
A second possible source for Blake's idea of biblical sublimity is offered
by Joseph Wittreich, Jr. He suggests that the
Renaissance tradition of reading the Book of Revelations as a "picture
prophecy" may have influenced Blake's reading of the
Bible. (5) Wittreich's suggestion is plausible in view of the great
love Blake had for Renaissance prints, but again there is no
concrete connection to indicate that this tradition of biblical interpretation
did influence Blake. Finally, De Luca speculates that
Blake may have been influenced in his thinking about biblical sublimity
by Cabbalistic doctrines of "the creative power inherent
in the Hebrew letters of...the unutterable Tetragrammaton". (6) As
is the case in Jerusalem plate 25, Blake does employ visual
imagery that could be construed as depicting Cabbalistic concepts.
(7) While all of these sources do provide possible avenues
for understanding Blake's idea of biblical sublimity, there is no evidence
of any one of these sources having a significant or direct
influence on Blake. What Blake means by the Sublime of the Bible is
sufficiently outlined within his own work.
Blake's sense of the Sublime of the Bible is generated by his way of
reading the Bible itself. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
shows Blake defining the tenets of this reading practice. Significantly,
this work is also the first time that Blake uses the word
"sublime" to describe a condition that is associated with intellectual
activity, "The head Sublime"(MHH 10:1, E 37), and as a
term that designates an ethical position, "The most sublime act is
to set another before you". (8) He playfully depicts his study of
the Bible in The Marriage ; writing that, accompanied by a particular
Angel who has become a Devil, "we often read the Bible
together in its infernal or diabolical sense". (9) What Blake calls
an "infernal or diabolical sense" of the Bible identifies a
rhetorical position arising from the ethical stance that his visionary
aesthetic takes in opposition to the social constructions of
institutional religion and moral law. In The Marriage Blake's text
becomes the site upon which a reader is to become
converted, experiencing a change of perspective from that of the reading
of the Bible advocated by Blake's Angels to the
diabolical reading of the Bible sponsored by Blake as narrator and
his Devils. But The Marriage does not offer a ready-made
template through which to read the multiple perspectives present in
the major prophecies; rather, it presents both Blake's
aesthetics and ethics in terms of oppositions, which on plate 11 entitled
"The voice of the Devil," he calls, "Contraries."
In Milton both Blake's aesthetics and ethics are more considerably complicated.
Here, the oppositional contraries of The
Marriage have given way to a more complex structure which dramatizes
multiple perspectives of a single action. These multiple
perspectives allow Blake to present the poetic realization of the sublime
experience. In The Marriage , Blake finds that "All
Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the following Errors".
(10) In Milton , Blake takes on the task of detailing the
process by revising the errors he found inherent in Milton's Christian
vision. Milton shifts the ground of biblical history to
reconstruct it as a model of aesthetic experience wherein the Last
Judgment becomes an instance of the aesthetic judgment of
the sublime. In Blake's description of his painting of The Last Judgment
, he defines his sense of the Last Judgment as a
recognition of aesthetic experience. In Blake's view, "The Last Judgment
is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science". (11) It is
this understanding of aesthetic experience which reveals the limits
of empirical science and brings into question the view of art
espoused by Reynolds in his Discourses . Blake's Last Judgment is not
the biblical apocalypse marking the end of time; it is an
individual experience that occurs "whenever any Individual Rejects
Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that
Individual". (12) The apocalypse of the fallen world is the individual
realization of the unbounded infinite of the sublime within
the finite human condition. Rather than identifying the Bible as the
source of error as in The Marriage , Milton shows the
necessity for an individual's re-envisioning of the Bible as a site
of aesthetic experience rather than as a Christian history and
guide to Moral Law. The binary of Angels and Devils in The Marriage
is supplanted by a threefold division within fallen
humanity between the Reprobate, the Redeemed, and the Elect in Milton
:
The Elect is one Class: ...
...they cannot Believe in Eternal Life
Except by Miracle & a New Birth. The other
two Classes;
The Reprobate who never cease to Believe,
and the Redeemed,
Who live in doubts & fears perpetually
tormented by the Elect (13)
The Elect embody the contradiction Blake sees in Miltonic Christianity
between its belief in a mysterious, invisible God of might,
yet its insistence on a seeing-is-believing policy of empirical verification
in all other matters. The Elect are the corporeal reality
of The Marriage 's Angels. The Reprobate "never cease to Believe" in
their own imaginative powers, but, as is made clear
through Blake's character Milton, this does not mean that they are
free of error; instead, they have the visionary talents through
which error is made manifest so that it can be identified and thereby
cast off. Thus, the vision of the Reprobate is always
provisional and subject to revision. The Reprobate are analogous to
The Marriage 's Devils. The third category, the
Redeemed, are the ground of the conflict The Marriage virtually ignores.
In Milton , Blake humanizes his revised concept of
contraries in terms of these three classes of men, "They are the Two
Contraries & the Reasoning Negative". (14) This focus on
the threefold significantly influences Milton 's aesthetic concerns
as a work of visual art as well.
In terms of its visual presentation, Milton 's threefold structure of
contrariety is embodied in its designs. Chief among these
figures is Blake's motif of the trilithon. Frye observes that "the
Druidic trilithon represents a geometrical or abstract form of the
perversion of the relation of the three classes". (15) These trilithons
appear on plates 3(a), and 4 of copy C, in close proximity
to the discussions of the three classes. (16) But the trilithons are
more than simply abstract manifestations of form. The trilithons
are structural representations specific to Blake's view of the arts
and the fate of biblical prophecy in the fallen world:
But in Eternity the Four Arts: Poetry, Painting,
Music,
and Architecture which is Science: are the
Four Faces of Man.
Not so in Time & Space: there Three are
shut out, and only
Science remains thro Mercy: & by means
of Science, the Three
Become apparent in Time & Space (17)
The trilithon is for Blake the perfect embodiment of the fallen arts.
Trilithons themselves serve a threefold purpose, since they
are works of architecture that are in the service of science (providing
a celestial schema measuring time by means of reference
to bodies in space), and they are also a shorthand visual reference
to the religious practices of Druidism which Blake associates
with human sacrifice.
From another perspective, the trilithons are the three arts which are
shut out of the fallen world, given visual representation as
unmoving stones; these arts are present, but entombed in the unmoving
material forms of the fallen world without being
mimetically represented. To the Corporeal Understanding, these stones
are merely material, hewn rock, which compose the
apparatus of the scientific perspective and Druidic rites. Yet for
the Intellectual powers, the trilithon is the appearance in time
and space of all four arts within one figure. Only by means of the
imaginative powers of apprehension present in the reader,
acting as a participant in constructing Blake's textual matrices, can
the arts of Eternity be revived. As a synecdoche, the trilithon
is the textual site for a reader's intellectual recognition by means
of visionary construction of multiplicity within identity: the four
arts, three of which are turned to stone in the service of the fallen
perspective, as one figure that is, in itself, threefold.
As a comment on the arts, the trilithons are also a visual recapitulation
of what Blake sees as the division of aesthetic qualities in
the fallen world in terms of Albion's body. Frye suggests that these
trilithons are a physicalization of the Blake's view of fallen
aesthetics as expressed in a passage on a proof of the frontispiece
piece of Jerusalem :
His Sublime & Pathos become Two Rocks fixd
in the Earth
His Reason his Spectrous Power, covers them
above
Jerusalem his Emanation is a Stone laying
beneath
O [Albion behold Pitying ] behold the Vision
of Albion (18)
Frye suggests that "the 'Sublime & Pathos' are the uprights and
the fallen reason covering them". (19) For Blake, the fallen
condition is one of aesthetic division where the sublime and the beautiful
can be imagined as "Two Rocks fixd in the Earth,"
where Albion's "Reason his Spectrous Power, covers them above". (20)
As an image of a divided aesthetic, the trilithon
resonates with Blake's description of a now lost painting of his called
The Ancient Britons where he indicates the visible
presence of a threefold division among post-lapsarian humanity as the
aesthetic qualities of the beautiful man of pathos, the
strong man of the sublime, and the ugly man of human reason. Both the
frontispiece of Jerusalem and the description of The
Ancient Britons describe a missing fourth. "Jerusalem his Emanation
is a Stone laying beneath," is the missing fourth which
appears in Jerusalem . (21) In the description of The Ancient Britons
, "the form of the fourth was like the Son of God". (22)
Blake also points out that these four individual figures "were originally
one man, who was fourfold" from the perspective of the
prelapsarian state, but that this figure, like Albion in Jerusalem
"was self divided". (23)
Finally, when Blake refers to the Four Arts in Eternity, he is alluding
to the lost role of prophetic vision in his age and his own
attempt to revive it in The Four Zoas . In terms of the aesthetics
of Blake's Zoas myth, fourfold vision is a radically humanized
state of identity between the four Zoas as the psychic and aesthetic
constituents of the giant Albion. Blake's notion of the task of
both the biblical prophets and the task of his own prophetic works
situates the text as a program of challenges which serve to
uproot ontological certainty and alter perspective to provide gateways
to different states of existence.
It follows then that when Blake writes about "the Sublime of the Bible,"
it is not the Bible itself that functions as a sublime
object; instead, the Bible becomes the site of the sublime experience
for a Redeemed or Reprobate reader. The reader's
experience of the sublime is his or her ability to imaginatively apprehend
the visionary perspective implicit in the text; one which
"is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding". (24) The "Corporeal
Understanding" depends upon what Kant calls
the pure concepts to which the faculty of the understanding refers
or that which Burke in his Enquiry , associates with material
existence in the natural world. By employing the Intellectual powers,
Blake asks his reader to consider the ground of experience
in terms of the sublime boundlessness of one's ability to create imaginative
mental images. In this way, the text provides images
that can potentially dislocate a reader's perspective of the natural
world and thus manifest the unlimited constructive powers of
the imagination. By situating "the Sublime of the Bible" as an exchange
between a text's potential to stimulate a reader to realize
its and his or her own infinite visionary potential, it becomes possible
to place Blake's notion of the sublime in the context of
discussions about the sublime and the Bible.
In the tradition of commentary on the sublime, the Bible has been acknowledged
as a paradigm of sublimity from the beginning.
Longinus finds an important component of sublimity in the Biblical
creation myth in Genesis 1:3. "'God said,'--what? 'Let there
be light, and there was light; let there be land, and there was land'".
(25) But Blake probably would have disagreed with
Longinus's reason for citing this passage. Longinus saw the passage
from Genesis as an example of "the might of the Godhead"
as the foundation of Mosaic law. (26) Longinus's view merely reinscribes
the errors Blake saw in the Miltonic conception of
God.
Blake rejects the traditional view of the source of biblical sublimity
as generated by the depiction of the overwhelming force of
God as an ontological absolute, external, and final vis a vis the human
condition. This construction of a God of sublime might
manifests itself in the natural world through the powers of life, death,
and physical destruction. These Urizenic displays of power
are precisely what Burke also identifies as the source of the Bible's
sublimity: "In the scripture, whenever God is represented as
appearing or speaking, everything terrible in nature is called up to
heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence. The
psalms and prophetical books, are crowded with instances of this kind".
(27) The sublimity of God as constructed by Milton,
Longinus, and Burke is outside the range of the human condition and
beyond the abilities of the human powers of imagination to
represent.
However, what would have appealed to Blake about this construction of
biblical sublimity is the simultaneity of word and act
they depict. In Longinus's example, God's language is a constitutive
one. The act of God is utterance identical with the coming
into being of the thing itself. The same is true for Burke; God's threats
are acts of terrific might. But Blake radically changes the
notion of the creative powers of the Divine Presence. Specifically,
Blake objects to the understanding of the Genesis creation
myth which is typified by the Longinian reading wherein God's act of
creation supplants a universal condition that was "without
form and void". (28) This reading of Genesis, also present in Milton's
Paradise Lost , gives priority to a linear history beginning
with God's creation of the Earth in time and space. In A Vision of
The Last Judgement Blake states, "Many suppose that
before [Adam] [the Creation] All was solitude and Chaos This is the
most pernicious Idea that can enter the Mind as it takes
away all sublimity from the Bible & Limits All Existence to Creation
& to Chaos To the Time & Space fixed by the Corporeal
Vegetative Eye...". (29) Here, Blake indicates that his notion of the
sublimity of the Bible is grounded in a non-empirical
perspective which is not dependent on, nor is it limited to the comprehension
of the "Corporeal Vegetative Eye" in the same
way that he claims his Sublime Allegory is altogether hidden from the
Corporeal Understanding. Rather the sublimity Blake
finds in the Bible is in those images created by the Intellectual powers
in their ability to apprehend the infinite as the realization of
the image of the Divine Vision within the human form. The apprehension
of the infinite within the instant of the experience of the
sublime shifts the focus of Biblical typology from the life of Jesus
to that of an individual's aesthetic experience of the unbounded
possibilities of his or her own imagination. In this way Blake finds
in the simultaneity of word and act of the traditional views of
God's creative powers a model for aesthetic response.
Milton shows Blake's identification of the experience of the Sublime
of the Bible with the humanizing power of the fourfold
vision. This experience is the realization of the Divine presence in
the creative vision of the individual. The experience of the
Blakean sublime is marked by the perspectival shift of the imaginative
powers to a position that is, in his terms "circumferential"
of both time and space:
For in this Period the Poets work is Done:
and all the Great
Events of Time start forth & are concievd
in such a Period
Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery
(30)
For every Space larger than a red Globule of
mans blood.
Is visionary and created by the Hammer of
Los
And every Space smaller than a Globule of
Mans blood. opens
Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth
is but a shadow (31)
In both of these passages, Blake describes the regions surrounding Golgonooza.
These descriptions identify a synechdochic
relationship between the visionary apprehension of the instantaneous
and infinitesimal units of time and space in terms of human
form as that which is conceptually circumferential of the largest possible
dimensions of time and space. These synecdochic
relationships, critical to Blake's Golgonooza, may be derived, in part,
from the sublime biblical visions of the New Jerusalem
from Revelations and the City of the South in Ezekiel.
The source of Blake's idea of a text as the site of the experience of
the sublime is a direct result of his secular appropriation of
the function of biblical prophecy. Blake defines his notion of biblical
prophecy on plate 12 of The Marriage . Blake's interest in
the biblical prophets is not in the obscurity of their narratives nor
their abstruse verbal structures, although he adopts both to
some extent in the three major prophecies. For Blake, the chief value
of the prophets rests in their ability to stimulate the mind's
powers of imaginative vision. Rather than an attempt to describe a
thing that is seen with the corporeal eye, prophecy brings
into play the Intellectual powers to which Blake's Sublime Allegory
is addressed. In The Marriage , Blake's Isaiah claims that
his visions are inspired the instant when "my senses discover'd the
infinite in every thing", and Blake's Ezekiel states that
prophecy arises from "the desire of raising other men into a perception
of the infinite". (32) This sense of Prophecy as aesthetic
experience is the sublime of the Bible for Blake in its ability to
provide a site for the realization of the infinite within the finite
human condition.
To recognize the significance of Milton as a revision of what Blake
saw as the errors of Miltonic christianity is to see the radical
nature of Blake's aesthetics. When Blake claims that he will restore
the Sublime of the Bible, he is not merely employing the
term sublime as an honorific. For a reader, understanding Blake's notion
of the experience of the sublime is a necessary
component in developing a reading of Milton . Here, this experience
is dramatized in terms of several conflicts in the form of
concentric narratives embedded in the text, which include that of a
nameless Bard facing a stern audience in the Heavens of
Albion, Blake in his efforts to write The Four Zoas under the influence
of Hayley as a well-meaning, yet stifling patron, and
Blake's Milton in his struggle with the ethical implications of his
own biblical epics. (33) The central image for the site of this
struggle in Milton is a much more elaborate version of Golgonooza from
nights VIIa and VIII of The Four Zoas . Golgonooza
in Milton is the focus of the most important elements of Blake's work.
In Golgonooza, the Reprobate and the Redeemed, the
physical world and the imaginative world, and time and space all meet
in the sublime fourfold experience of the visionary instant.
Notes
(1) Susan Fox suggests that Blake's strident and uncompromising condemnation
of art that is not inspired may, in fact, be the
reason he removed it from copies C and D, "for it contradicts the attitude
of forgiveness and conversion that informs the poem
itself" [Susan Fox, Poetic Form in Blake's Milton Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1976) p. 26]. (back)
(2) William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake ,
ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (New York:
Doubleday, 1988) pl 1[i], 95. Hereafter referred to as E. (back)
(3) Vincent Arthur De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics
of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) p.
84. (back)
(4) Morton Paley, The Continuing City (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) pp. 45-7 and De Luca pp. 86-88. (back)
(5) Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Visionary Poetics: Milton's Tradition
and His Legacy (San Marino, CA: Huntington
Library, 1979) pp. 19-26. (back)
(6) De Luca p. 87. (6)
(7) William Blake, Jerusalem plate 1 trial proof. White-line etching,
watercolors, pen and ink. Fitzwilliam Museum. Jerusalem
(Princeton: Princeton UP) 1991.
(back)
(8) MHH 10:1, E 37 and MHH 7:17, E 36. This notion of the sublime as
it is presented in The Marriage , as an act, is also
important to Milton because this ethical position is an action. As
De Luca notes, "The sublime experience must eventuate in a
sublime doing , or else the interplay of intellect and its self-satisfying
desire remains a sterile and narcissistic exercise, quite alien
to anything we know of Blake's program" (44). (back)
(9) MHH 24, E 43. (back)
(10) MHH 4, E 34. (back)
(11) VLJ, E 565. (back)
(12) VLJ, E 562. (back)
(13) M 25[27]: 32-37, E 122. (back)
(14) M 5:14, E 98. (back)
(15) Northrop Frye, "Notes for a Commentary on Milton ." The Divine
Vision . Vivian De Sola Pinto, ed. (London: Victor
Gollancz, 1957) p. 131. (back)
(16) William Blake, Milton plate 3. Rare Books and Manuscripts Division,
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations. Milton . (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993).
William Blake, Milton plate 4. Rare Books and Manuscripts Division,
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations. Milton . (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993).
(back)
(17) M 27[29]:55-59, E 125. (back)
(18) Text: J 1: 4-7, E 144. Figure 4, William Blake, Jerusalem plate
1 trial proof. White-line etching, watercolors, pen and ink.
Fitzwilliam Museum. Jerusalem (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991).
(back)
(19) Frye p. 131. (back)
(20) J 1:4-5, E 144. (back)
(21) J 1:6, E 144. (back)
(22) AB, E 543. (back)
(23) AB, E 543. (back)
(24) Letter to Thomas Butts July 6, 1803, E 730. (back)
(25) Longinus, "On the Sublime," Critical Theory Since Plato , ed. Hazard
Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich,
1992) p. 80. (back)
(26) Longinus, "On the Sublime" p. 80. (back)
(27) Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful. (New York:
Oxford UP, 1990 [1757]) pp. 63-4. (back)
(28) Genesis 1:2. (back)
(29) VLJ, E 563. (back)
(30) M 29[31]:1-3, E 127. (back)
(31) M 29[31]: 19-22, E 127. (back)
(32) MHH, E 39 and MHH, E 39. (back)
(33) Essick and Viscomi in the Blake Trust / Princeton edition of Milton
copy C note that while "Recent criticism has tended to
shun biographical readings of the 'Bard's Song', apparently on the
supposition that to peruse them would reduce the universal to
the petty. We suggest to the contrary that the origins of Milton in
Blake's relationship with Hayley and the poem's veiled
references to it provide a grounding in quotidian experiences that
make the work more accessible, more human in everyday
terms" (15). Their edition presents concise and relevant biographical
elements of Blake's Milton. (back)
David M. Baulch
University of Washington
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