MHH Free for All
Posted by admin on October 17, 2008, 5:07 pm
The floor is open for any arguments you’d like to make about Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
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Posted by admin on October 17, 2008, 5:07 pm
The floor is open for any arguments you’d like to make about Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:02 pm
In this post, I attempt to describe Blake’s morality and it’s limitations.
William Blake turns devils into angels in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” but it is his underlying message that all beings are good in their natural state that allows him to make this jump. In the “Proverbs of Hell” Blake states, “Sooner murder and infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” Blake is making a poetic statement, and one that isn’t supposed to be taken completely literally, but the statement certainly ignores that not all desires are savory. Murdering babies in their cradles would be the best example.
Blake’s morality is exampled in the eleventh plate, “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” He isn’t necessarily arguing that all deities are fictitious. Blake is arguing that the things we would call deities are merely the poetic embodiments of energies. For Blake, religion does not form the man, on the contrary, man makes the religion. As Blake explains, “a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood.” Priesthood and the confines of the church are to Blake unsavory things, because they are formed out of trying to make reason out of what is to Blake the beautiful chaos of energy. Blake is therefore contradicting his rule when he states, “sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,” because it is the desire for power which ultimately makes men confuse deities and poetry.
It is contrary then, for Blake to describe the system and therefore encapsulate the same energies in his own form of poetry. He states in plate 14, “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” Though Blake is trying to cleanse the doors of perception, he is making things as infinite as his stack of plates are mysterious. Morality, then, is indescribable for Blake, except as the reversal of norms. Because he is writing and therefore containing the same energies he sees as infinite, it is impossible for him to escape this truth. By the end of the “story,” Blake exclaims, “Empire is no more! And now the lion & wolf shall cease”…”For every thing that lives is Holy.” Blake is continuing the rule from the “Proverbs of Hell” that “where man is not, nature is barren,” and he’s also idling in a naturalistic view that states simply, things are impressive because they are not evil.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:39 am
In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” William Blake writes a great deal about human desire, identifying the repression of desire as not simply being an injustice to the human being, but that it leads to the production of negative and often counter-human results, most notably through Christianity. In his “Proverbs of Hell,” Blake states: “he who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” This pestilence appears to me as a manifestation of ignorance and dissatisfaction with one’s interactions with and knowledge of the world.
Similarly, on plate 27, Blake says “nor pale religious lechery call that virginity that wishes but acts not.” This shows the dichotomy between the mental and the physical that desire creates. Although Blake uses the vulgarity of sexual imagery to make his point, virginity might also be considered a metaphor for the state of an individual’s inexperience or innocence caused by repression of desire. Blake poses that the bodily repression of acting on immoral desire is just as immoral as actually performing it, that is, if the mind truly desires it. Such repression of desire breeds a kind of moral pestilence.
Another proverb, “What is now proved was once only imagin’d,” suggests that knowledge itself does not necessarily come directly from God, rather it is human imagination, or the desire for knowledge that draws out worldly facts from the fictions of the mind. That same proverb is reflected in Blake’s assessment of the creation of organized religion on plate 11. He essentially describes the ancient Poets’ desire to abstract their “Gods or Geniuses” by However, the “proved” in this case, seems to be the acceptance of deities and religion.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
In “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake’s disapproval of institutionalized religion and conventional moral codes that derive from religion is evident. Throughout the text, but particularly from the section “The Voice of the Devil,” Blake emphasizes the orthodox Christianity’s tendency to encourage and enforce self-denial, in which men are to repress their desires in order to avoid them sin. However, Blake argues against such beliefs by rechristening Evil as Energy, not only giving it a more positive connotation, but also making evil into a more natural force created within the human body. Therefore, through referring Evil as Energy and equating the two together, Blake portrays the conventional religious beliefs as repressive and unnatural.
The section “Voice of the Devil” also shows another belief of Blake that goes against the beliefs taught by orthodox Christianity. In the ‘contraries,’ Blake claims that the body is not separate from the soul, as it “is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” Blake further argues against the traditional notion in which the body must submit to the soul in denying it t he earthly pleasures called sin, by claiming that the body is an extension of the soul, an instrument necessary to feed the soul properly through its senses. Without encountering the worldly matters through the senses, the soul lacks experience to make the right judgments: therefore, denying the body its natural urges, or the Energy, is denying the soul of proper nourishment to develop better Reason.
However, perhaps the most daring claim the section makes comes from the last part of the Contraries, in which it states that “Energy is Eternal Delight.” The quote is one of the contraries presented by the devil that corresponds to the third ‘Sacred codes’ presented, which states “That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.” The third contrary directly goes against the third Sacred code, which has been the underlying basis for hell in orthodox religion: indulge in the worldly/ bodily urges and pursuits and God will make you pay in afterlife. The third contrary, however, claims the opposite of what the standard Christianity taught during the time by encouraging the pursuit, by equating Energy to “Eternal Delight.” If sinners, in an orthodox sense, are punished for indulging on their natural urges, and if hell is reserved for sinners, then according to the Voice of Devil, then hell is a place for those who followed their natural instincts and therefore led a life of satisfaction. Therefore, the section “The Voice of Devil” points out the repression of joy in orthodox religion so daringly, that it even suggests hell as the escape from such legalities and rules, as a place to be natural, free, and thus, in “Eternal Delight.”