“A Firm Perswasion”: God, Art, and Responsibility in Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Abstract

Scholars have argued that William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (begun in 1790) is principally about its author's understanding of God. This article, based on plates 22 to 24 and 12 to 13, argues that it illustrates how Blake integrates and takes responsibility for his imago dei and how he associates this imago with art. It also explores the degree to which his views depend on inner conviction—a “firm perswasion”—and the very real danger that inhabits such a view. It shows how Blake anticipates a great many features of Jungian practice: for instance, the use of active imagination; the need to assume responsibility for one's projections, especially one's shadow tendencies; and Blake's evident belief that the goal of the encounter with the inner world should be greater consciousness and understanding.

Keywords:

• active imagination
• art
• William Blake
• Bible
• Ezekiel
• God
• integration of projection
• Isaiah
• Jungian practice
• poetic genius
• shadow
• Emanuel Swedenborg

Note

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

^1. We first experience otherness—whether God, a parent, or a challenge—as something whose awesomeness, characteristics, or difficulty we regard as objective. As we reflect on the experience, we learn progressively that the numinous, or an ascribed character trait, or the difficulty, is largely, even if not entirely, of our own making, and that what we took to be objective is largely a reflection of subjective tendencies. Only by integrating our projections can we begin to establish a more authentic relation with the issue or individual in question.

^2. All references to the Bible are to the King James Version.

^3. Unless otherwise stated, all references to Blake's texts are to the standard edition edited by David V. Erdman (Blake, 1965/1988): The Marriage of Heaven and Hell spans pages 33 to 45. Howard (1970) suggests that Rev. 1:14 might also be a source for this “flame of fire”: but in John's vision on Patmos, the phrase “a flame of fire” (KJV) is applied to the son of man's eyes; and it is difficult to see why an image suggestive of an ability to see into the interior of a person's soul should lie behind the flame of fire out of which the Devil rises.

^4. Copy K of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), which is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, consists only of plates 21–24. The design of Nebuchadnezzar is missing, which suggests that Blake was uncertain what design he wanted as an endpiece to his tract; see Viscomi (1997, 288).

^5. Examples can be found in Plato, Xenophon (Hiero, 474 bce), Cicero (“The Dream of Scipio” in bk. 6 of De Re Publica, 51 bce), and Lucian (Dialogues of the Dead, Dialogues of the Gods, c.170 ce). In the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Lucianic model became especially popular, albeit heavily watered with didacticism, for example, the Dialogues of the Dead by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1683), by François Fénelon (1700–1718), and by George Lyttelton (1760). It is doubtful whether any of these works owed much to inner experience: they are all carefully elaborated to achieve their various rhetorical purposes. Readers familiar with the moralizing tone of the French and English adaptations of Dialogues of the Dead would have been startled by Blake's audacity.

^6. The Biblical text is not about eating dung; it is about eating cakes cooked over a fire made of sun-dried dung, an offense against the hygiene code.