WILLIAM BLAKE loved the Bible. A picture that he painted when he was in his 20s testifies to the devotion. Now entitled An Allegory of the Bible, the image shows a procession of women and children approaching an open Bible on a raised platform that looks like an altar. The book radiates light. The women are in awe of its presence, and are also reading and learning from the Good Book. The message of the image is clear: from this text comes inspiration.
The love is underlined in a notebook dating to the last part of his life. One comment reads that the Bible is “Eternal Vision or Imagination of All that Exists”. Though the statement raises questions: what did Blake love about the Bible? How did he read it, and is that relevant to readers now?
His affair with scripture began young. From the age of about ten, his parents took him out of regular education. Home schooling, avant la lettre, became a key mode of learning, with the Bible a central text. That said, he learnt not as the contemporary home-educated child might, if they are taught that the Bible is a history book. Religious literalism, which he perceived as a reduction of the gospel, was always abhorrent to him, and, in his adult life, he developed richer ways of allowing scripture to inspire him.
One of his favourite Pauline quotes is central: “For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The Spirit in the text met the Spirit alive in him, and, from that, flowed images and poetry.
He painted dozens of biblical scenes, often with a twist. There is the picture of Jesus on the cross with an onlooker mimicking the cruciform shape: taking up the cross. Or consider the way in which Blake depicted the scene of the woman caught in adultery: Jesus writes in the dirt, but also appears to bow to the one accused. He is recognising the “human form divine” in her that is also in him.
THIS approach seeks resonances, themes, and depth, and echoes the way of reading the Bible that runs all the way back to the Church Fathers. St Augustine, for example, says that the parable of the Good Samaritan is not a moral tale but is actually about Jesus. When, in the story, the injured man is placed on the Good Samaritan’s donkey and carried to the inn, the detail tells us that Jesus places us in his body to carry us to heaven.
Blake “harked back to a way of reading the Bible that is more characteristic of the early centuries of Christianity and of medieval scholarship than it is of the early modern period”, Christopher Rowland concludes in his study Blake and the Bible.
The Bible is artful — a “Great Code of Art”, Blake insisted. The word “code” is meant in the sense of “cipher”, the scholar Susanne Sklar has suggested: a means of unlocking what is otherwise hidden. To read the Bible properly, by this reckoning, is to encounter a wonderful puzzle, a multidimensional space, a self-disclosing entity.
Imagination is key. For Blake, the imagination is not a faculty that human beings possess and exercise if they are creatively inclined. Rather, the imagination is the active presence of God, filling and shaping all things. “Nature is imagination itself,” he wrote.
He linked the imagination to Jesus, seeing it as the creative power of Christ running throughout creation. When we become aware of this dynamic, we are simultaneously becoming conscious of being part of what Blake referred to as the “divine body”: creation being an emanation of God and God being the destiny of all creation.
“This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the Vegetated body,” he wrote. When it comes to reading the Bible, then, deploying an active imagination is key; that is to engage with the divine Spirit alive in the text.
Consider the way Blake painted the entry into Jerusalem, the main event of Palm Sunday. The scene is recognisable: the main figure is Jesus riding on a donkey, followed by Mary and the disciples, with the people carrying palms and bowing down before Jesus. Then the viewer looks again. The donkey has the head of a sheep. There are several children walking alongside Jesus. And the city towards which the procession is moving looks more heavenly than terrestrial.
Blake was reading the story with an imaginative eye on the New Jerusalem of the book of Revelation. He particularly loved the last book of the Bible because of its imaginative power. Hence, the donkey of Palm Sunday is used to reference the Lamb of God, and the Judaean city of Jerusalem is portrayed in its apocalyptic form. The children are a telling detail, too, speaking of the virtue of open-minded innocence that Blake argued is crucial for perceiving the meaning and significance of things.
Further, for Blake, the apocalypse is not a future judgement or calamity but is the moment by moment chance we have of awakening to the fullness of life, via the imagination. “Whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth, a Last Judgement passes upon that Individual,” he wrote.
He felt so strongly about reading the Bible imaginatively that he could be straightforwardly rude to those he felt were not doing so. Take the case of the Revd Dr Trusler. This clergyman wanted to popularise the gospel so as to supply what is now called self-help: handy tips on being kind, say, that help you through the day. He therefore commissioned Blake to paint scenes that might illustrate the advice.
But the designs Blake produced utterly confused Trusler, given the letter that Blake wrote back, for Blake did not approve of Trusler’s approach: “I really am sorry that you are fall’n out with the Spiritual World,” Blake said. Treat the Bible unimaginatively, and you undermine its ability to lift you to eternity.
THEOLOGICAL ramifications follow, too. Take the issue of universal salvation. Blake was a strong adherent of the conviction that, again to use St Paul’s words, “God will be all in all.” If that is denied, then, according to Blake, a fundamental message of the Bible has been twisted. “All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors,” he explained in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, not least of which is the vile conclusion “That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.” He had spotted that, in the Gospels, Jesus judges not to condemn, but to liberate.
Eternal salvation might be regarded as a matter to be decided one way or another: does God send people to hell or not? But, in fact, Blake’s purpose is more dynamic. The Bible is an inspired text, which means that it cannot be neatly pinned down. Scripture might even say different things to different people at different times, and lead to seemingly contradictory conclusions.
Take the question of the conception of Jesus and the part played by his mother, Mary. Blake is, on one reading, orthodox. For instance, he overtly referred to the mother of Jesus by her formal title, “the Virgin Mary”, and painted one image entitled “Virgin and Child” that was clearly inspired by Greek Orthodox icons, which he would have seen in Georgian London.
But, on other occasions, Blake also asserted that Mary was not a virgin when she became pregnant. Here is an apparent contradiction and a whiff of heterodoxy. For example, in his epic poem “Jerusalem: The emanation of the Giant Albion”, he retold the tale of Joseph discovering that his wife-to-be was expecting a child, caused in the usual, sexual way.
Joseph is not happy at first, but Mary persuades him to feel otherwise, as, she says, her pregnancy is an opportunity for them mutually to discover a faithfulness that rests on love itself, not any ethical code. That was an important gospel principle for Blake, not because he was antinomian, but because he feared that the vitality of Christianity was lost when it is preached mostly as a moral creed.
Blake engaged with the Bible as a living, sacred text. He rejected ways of reading scripture as if its primary function was to tell you what happened, and why. That historicism has arguably become dominant today, as if the Gospels are storehouses of evidence and proof-texts. But Blake would have us reject this fashion, and recover an older understanding.
There are timeless verities in the Bible, for sure. But they are not held in the form of instructions, or even principles, but as a stance and way of life that can be embraced. “The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sin,” Blake affirmed, highlighting the fundamental truth he found in the Bible. As he put it, again echoing the Church Fathers, “God became as we are that we may be as He is.”
Mark Vernon is the author of Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, published by Hurst at £27.50 (Church Times Bookshop £24.75); 978-1-911723-97-4.
