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- Blake’s symbolism was drawn from multiple dissenting theologies in circulation in the latter half of the 18th century, chief amongst which were the Boehmist, Swedenborgian and Muggletonian doctrines.
www.ngmeeting.house/blog/blakes-religious-and-political-dissentBlake’s Religious and Political Dissent [by Richard Crawford]
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Nov 2, 2016 · Rather, the Bible is the particular set of symbols that are embedded in the Western imagination, inspiring Blake as it inspired Michelangelo and Raphael before him. But he always read the Bible, as Erdman puts it, counterclockwise, in explicit contrast to orthodox interpretation.
British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson's last finished work, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993), claims to show how far he was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English Civil War.
- Overview
- Blake’s religion
- Education as artist and engraver
Blake was christened, married, and buried by the rites of the Church of England, but his creed was likely to outrage the orthodox. In “A Vision of the Last Judgment” he wrote that “the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being,” whom Blake called variously Nobodaddy and Urizen, and in his emblem book For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he addressed Satan as “The Accuser who is The God of This World.” To Robinson “He warmly declared that all he knew is in the Bible. But he understands the Bible in its spiritual sense.” Blake’s religious singularity is demonstrated in his poem “The Everlasting Gospel” (c. 1818):
The Vision of Christ that thou dost See
Is my Visions Greatest Enemy
…
Both read the Bible day & night
But thou readst black where I read White.
Blake was christened, married, and buried by the rites of the Church of England, but his creed was likely to outrage the orthodox. In “A Vision of the Last Judgment” he wrote that “the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being,” whom Blake called variously Nobodaddy and Urizen, and in his emblem book For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he addressed Satan as “The Accuser who is The God of This World.” To Robinson “He warmly declared that all he knew is in the Bible. But he understands the Bible in its spiritual sense.” Blake’s religious singularity is demonstrated in his poem “The Everlasting Gospel” (c. 1818):
The Vision of Christ that thou dost See
Is my Visions Greatest Enemy
…
Both read the Bible day & night
But thou readst black where I read White.
From childhood Blake wanted to be an artist, at the time an unusual aspiration for someone from a family of small businessmen and Nonconformists (dissenting Protestants). His father indulged him by sending him to Henry Pars’s Drawing School in the Strand, London (1767–72). The boy hoped to be apprenticed to some artist of the newly formed and flourishing English school of painting, but the fees proved to be more than the parental pocket could withstand. Instead he went with his father in 1772 to interview the successful and fashionable engraver William Wynne Ryland. Ryland’s fee, perhaps £100, was both “more attainable” than that of fashionable painters and still, for the Blakes, very high; furthermore the boy interposed an unexpected objection: “Father, I do not like the man’s face; it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” Eleven years later, Ryland was indeed hanged—for forgery—one of the last criminals to suffer on the infamous gallows known as Tyburn Tree.
The young Blake was ultimately apprenticed for 50 guineas to James Basire (1730–1802), a highly responsible and conservative line engraver who specialized in prints depicting architecture. For seven years (1772–79) Blake lived with Basire’s family on Great Queen Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. There he learned to polish the copperplates, to sharpen the gravers, to grind the ink, to reduce the images to the size of the copper, to prepare the plates for etching with acid, and eventually to push the sharp graver through the copper, with the light filtered through gauze so that the glare reflected from the brilliantly polished copper would not dazzle him. He became so proficient in all aspects of his craft that Basire trusted him to go by himself to Westminster Abbey to copy the marvelous medieval monuments there for one of the greatest illustrated English books of the last quarter of the 18th century, the antiquarian Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain (vol. 1, 1786).
- G.E. Bentley
May 28, 2006 · He detected flawed religious thinking at the root of most of the social disorders afflicting England in his time, and found that even the highest virtues associated with religion - “Mercy Pity Peace and Love” (E 12) - were routinely misconceived or manipulated for destructive ends.
- Robert Ryan
- 2003
May 20, 2022 · Blake was profoundly influenced by Emmanuel Swedenborg’s teachings, and in April 1789 he attended the general conference of the Swedenborgian “New Church” in London and he based his design called The Spiritual Preceptor (1809) on Swedenborg’s book True Christian Religion. He soon decided, however, that the New Church was as subject to ...
- banu@new-unity.org
pictures depict original ideas and conceptions of Blake's own while embellishing Young's text. The first public recognition of Blake's achievement did not come until 1875 when J. Comyns Carr wrote that the Night Thoughts illustrations provided Blake's own interpretation of the poem and embodied germs of ideas that Blake developed in subsequent ...
Dec 2, 2016 · A spiritual writer throughout his life, Blake wanted to expose religious corruption and refocus modern worship on its pure origins. Like much of his religious work, this poem contains subtle sexual imagery and violence, themes Blake explored on a larger scale with the “Prophetic books.”
