March 4, 2025 • 54 mins
The latest conversation on Subversive Orthodoxy plunges deep into the heart of creativity and belief through the lens of two iconic figures: William Blake and Johann von Goethe. This episode invites you on a journey as we unravel the intricate relationship between imagination and faith, set against the backdrop of the dominating philosophies of the Enlightenment. In a world increasingly detached from its spiritual roots, Blake and Goethe serve as guiding lights, advocating for the embrace of the imaginative spirit in a culture often dismissive of visions and creativity.
Throughout the episode, we examine how Blake's radical views, rooted in deep mystical experiences, contest the boundaries of traditional Christian morality. His lyrical exploration in "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience" eloquently articulates the contrasting states of the human soul, advocating for a faith blossoming from personal experience and creative expression. Meanwhile, Goethe’s innovations in "Faust" reflect a profound engagement with the tension between reason and transcendence, embodying a pantheistic view that sees God within nature itself.
Listeners will find this episode not just intellectually stimulating but also emotionally resonant, as we pose challenging questions about our collective journey towards understanding the divine in the presence of rational thought. As we explore Blake and Goethe’s enduring legacies, the podcast calls upon you to reconnect with your imagination, inspiring a deeper journey into your own spirituality and the world around you.
Join us as we navigate the boundaries of art, philosophy, and faith, and discover how deeply interwoven these elements are in our quest for meaning amid the chaos of contemporary life. We would love for you to subscribe, share, and leave a review so we can continue to foster this enriching dialogue and bring transformative conversations into your life.
Show Notes:
More on Blake Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVtLe1H6Jqs
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Having visions doesn't prove you're crazy.
A culture that has no use forvisions is crazy.
Off as atoms bumping into atoms, but as opportunities to
(00:30):
exercise their own imaginationeither in painting or art, or
even just self-understanding.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast.
I'm your host, Travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
Aversive Orthodoxy podcast.
I'm your host, Travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we, as humans,withstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
(01:00):
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
It's great entertainment, thrilling
entertainment.
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Sometimes, when I get bored, Ilike to fly above the clouds and
I ask the Lord what does ittake to get down?
And every time I ask, heteaches me the same thing.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Just bleed originality.
On this episode, we're going toexplore two of the most
imaginative and rebellious mindsof their time, william Blake
and Johann von Goethe.
Both were deeply concerned withthe rise of Enlightenment
rationalism, a movement thatemphasized reason, empirical
observation and mechanisticexplanations of the universe.
While these new ways ofthinking brought incredible
(02:06):
scientific advancements, theyalso, in Blake and Goethe's eyes
, stripped the world of its soul.
Both men fought to reclaim theimagination, myth and the
transcendent from a worldincreasingly defined by logic
and materialism.
But while they sought toreinvigorate spiritual life,
their relationship withChristian doctrine was
(02:26):
unorthodox, complex and at timessubversive.
To understand theircontributions, we have to set
the stage.
The late 18th and early 19thcenturies saw the dominance of
the new sciences, championed bythinkers like Newton, descartes
and Locke.
The natural world was nowexplained in terms of
predictable laws, and reason wasseen as the highest authority.
(02:48):
Even theology was shifting,with deism proposing a distant,
uninvolved creator rather thanan incarnate, personal God.
In England, blake saw the statechurch as rigid and moralistic,
while in Germany, goethe wasresponding to a Protestant
landscape that had become overlyintellectualized and
systematized.
Both sought a return tosomething deeper, something more
(03:09):
alive.
Blake, born in 1757, was avisionary poet, artist and
engraver, who claimed to havemystical experiences from
childhood.
He saw Enlightenment,rationalism, as a form of
enslavement that stifled humancreativity and spiritual vision.
His works, like Songs ofInnocence and Experience and the
(03:29):
Marriage of Heaven and Hell,presented a radical alternative
to the prevailing worldview.
For Blake, imagination wasdivine and Christ was the
ultimate symbol of creativeliberation.
However, his theology was farfrom orthodox.
He rejected original sin, helland the idea of a punitive God.
He saw traditional Christianmorality as oppressive and
(03:51):
instead proposed a faithcentered on creative freedom.
Playwright, scientist andstatesman, his masterpiece,
faust, wrestled with the tensionbetween reason and
transcendence, ultimatelysuggesting that salvation comes
not from faith alone but fromhuman striving.
(04:13):
While fascinated by Jesus,goethe rejected the Trinity, the
resurrection and miracles,embracing instead a pantheistic
view of God as a force withinnature.
Though he valued spirituality,his approach was more
philosophical than doctrinal.
Both Blake and Goethe wereintellectual rebels, challenging
the dominance of rationalismand fighting to restore the
(04:35):
imagination to its rightfulplace.
While they sought to keep thedivine alive in the modern world
, they often stood outside thetraditional Christian orthodoxy.
Yet their critiques remaindeeply relevant today, reminding
us that faith is not just asystem of beliefs but an
encounter with mystery, beautyand the transformative power of
the imagination.
With no further ado, I'd liketo welcome Professor Larry.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Thank you, travis, great to be with you.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
How are you doing this week?
Speaker 1 (05:03):
I'm doing great.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Are you ready to talk about some crazy guys?
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Well, yeah, let's talk about Blakey and Madden.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Under the heading of those first five people, the
Soul Under Siege.
Can you tell us what were youthinking with Blake?
He's very unorthodox and samewith Goethe.
How did they make it into yourbook?
Speaker 1 (05:23):
and same with Goethe.
How did they make it into yourbook?
Well, they are two people, twoartists and philosophers and
major figures in the Westerncanon, who were Christian in
their came out of Christiancultures, thought of themselves
as Christian in their worldview,understood themselves, however
nitpicking theologians might beas to their orthodoxy, embraced
(05:48):
what they considered a Christianworldview in conflict with the
new enlightenment energies, andthey were trying to sort of see
how they fit and what these newdeist ideas or Kant's religion
within the bounds of reasonalone, meant for themselves as
(06:14):
artists and as human beings andas people with really
existential problems, which theydidn't have the word
existential, we'll get into thatlater.
But they set the ground forthat by trying to find where
they fit in.
They started elaboratingspiritual psychologies, both of
(06:39):
them more than theologies andmore than theological debates.
They were more interested indeveloping a spiritual
psychology and of coursepsychology didn't exist yet.
So a lot of their ideas camefrom being in dialogue with,
(06:59):
let's say, religious spiritualdirectors and Protestant pastors
and Catholic contemplatives andpeople that were not academic
theologians by any means.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Did you?
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
When you say they were almost creating a
psychology, do you think thatwas like they were trying to
speak to something that theycould feel like they?
They sense this need toidentify the psyche, or they
needed to understand why theirpsyche was so spiritual, or what
do you think was happeningthere?
If psychology if psychologywasn't a word yet really really?
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yes, I think the latter.
I think that they felt thatsomething was being left out of
the equation that emphasizedmeasurement and calculation in
calculation, and particularlypoetry and literature, which
(08:06):
were and for Blake, theimagination, artistic
imagination, painting andengraving more than syllogisms,
spoke to the Christian vision.
I think somewhere in Blake andI was looking for it, but I
never found it he says that, inorder to be a Christian,
(08:37):
christians understand Christthrough the imagination.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And so it's an imaginative.
What do you think he means bythat?
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Well that it's an imaginative act, to, to have
(09:02):
faith in, to see in Jesussomething more than a failed
political leader or somebodywith a set of ethical ideas,
because the Gospels invite youto a different, imaginative
conception of the whole.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
So let me ask I'm trying to grasp this Do you
think they're saying living byfaith or having faith is
actually almost synonymous orvery similar to imagination?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Well, blake, yes, explicitly says that.
Okay, goethe is a little bitmore indirect, but we'll talk
about him another time.
But Blake, one of the greatthings about Blake, and one of
(09:52):
the things that why I put himfirst and why we're talking
about him today, is that he'snot one of those people that you
can read on your own, andeverybody knows that.
He's central to the Westerncanon and becoming more and more
(10:14):
central to Western literatureas we speak.
But when you try to read him orwhen you you get into some of
those long works that Blakewrote and he uses this own
(10:36):
jargon of his own invention, hecan be kind of confusing and
especially with this mixture ofheaven and hell and innocence
and experience and, as youpointed out, some ideas that
just don't make sense to acontemporary person.
(10:59):
Like there was a period wherehe he didn't believe in the the
uh round earth.
Uh, he was a flat earther, uh,and, and that's you know, if
you're a contemporary, that's,it's kind of hard to take
seriously somebody who whodoesn't believe that the earth
is round.
That that's made a resurgencelately.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Yeah yeah.
There's people who say that now.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Maybe he'll have a comeback as a literal figure.
And then also, though thedoctrinal denominational
squabbles and academictheological battles don't
(11:47):
necessarily know how to enterinto, some of these poems that
seem written in the voices ofangels or stories about his
conversations with angels, andthese kinds of things are a
little hard to get.
(12:10):
But I hope today we can justsort of sweep away some of the
problems that people have withthat, to get at what is still
there in him worth payingattention to, and things that
Blake says that nobody else hassaid or that don't make any
(12:33):
sense, because he's sayingsomething that doesn't fit into
our time and that our time ismissing a capacity to understand
myth and symbol he doesn't notunderstand.
It isn't his problem that he'snot a total literalist in his
(12:54):
ability to explain that you canlearn more about religious faith
going to Sistine Chapel orlooking at his illustrations for
Dante's Inferno than you can inreading a, you know, a treatise
refuting the logic of myth orsomething.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Well, it's it's.
It is relevant that we'retalking about it because those
are issues that are currentlyhappening, like the art.
The Christian artist world issaying, like how did we lose art
?
Like it used to be important inthe church, and the world knows
that the, the secular world,goes to these temples, in these
(13:35):
churches, in these cathedrals,like in Spain I went to the.
Oh man, I can't remember thename, it's got a crazy name the
big, beautiful, beautiful one inSpain, and it's just a work of
art completely, and it was tothe glory of God, you know, in
architecture, and so many were.
And then we got intoutilitarianism because of the
(13:57):
timeframe that Blake is speakingat Exactly.
So that's art, but then alsomysticism and symbol.
We know nothing of that.
We are so, whether we like itor not, as Americans we have,
even if we believe in prayer,we're so unmystical that we
(14:20):
barely pray because we cannotcomprehend things that don't
actually are not met.
You can't record it withmetrics or money, like you can't
record.
You can't record how effective aprayer was or an encounter with
jesus it becomes a self-helppractice, you know yeah, rather
than a mystical practice, um sowhile I don't I don't fully
(14:44):
understand what blake is saying,yet I can feel its relevance,
as you, as you unpack him and asyou know, as I've read the
chapter, I could, I could feelthe relevance, you know, despite
the, you know, unorthodox inhis, in his primary theology.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
But or is, or his physics and geography, yeah, his
view of the earth.
Okay, this is one way ofthinking of it.
And let's go into his biographya little bit.
Blake wanted to be a painterbut he dropped out of school at
(15:27):
10 and got apprenticed to anengraver and took a trade which
he hoped would help him.
You know, get married and havea family.
And he married a illiteratewoman who couldn't read, and
they had one child who died in amiscarriage, a girl.
(15:53):
So he never had any children.
He and his wife lived in atwo-room apartment in London
with a little garden in the back, pretty much in poverty.
And his whole life.
In fact, one of thedescriptions of one of the
critics that came to visit himthat had seen one of his
(16:16):
artworks at the Royal Academywhere he had his works at one
time, and he called it squalor Ithink that might be a little
too strong, but he said thatBlake was living in squalor and
(16:36):
throughout his life he was neveraccepted.
He was considered kind of acrazy guy, a religious fanatic,
and when he died he was buriedin an unmarked grave.
They dug him, re-dug him, dughim up and re-buried him in the
(17:08):
dissenter's graveyard in.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
London.
Is it a specific graveyard fordissenters?
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah.
I don't know if they call itdissenters, know if they they
call it the centers.
They also call it somethinglike um uh, not counterculture,
but um uh, contrarians orsomething.
They have a, they have a wholeum a cemetery there, uh, and so
(17:36):
he's, he's there, and and now hehas a nice, uh, big, big burial
site with his name and hisdates and there's a statue of
him in Canterbury Cathedral.
Is it Canterbury?
What's the one that has all thewriters buried?
(18:00):
That's Canterbury, right?
I'm not sure, because hisstatue is staring at Dryden,
which is kind of a joke, becauseDryden is such a rationalist.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Well no, he's staring him down forever, then yeah,
but anyway.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
so why I bring this up is oh is it.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Westminster Abbey Poet's Corner.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yes, yes, that's what it is.
Oh cool, there's a statue onhim, Westminster Abbey.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
If our listeners have a place of pilgrimage.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
If they go to England .
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yes, sort of like well, anyway, anyway, so let's
get up, so anyway, that, um then, after he died, he was totally
forgotten.
It was, like you know, put himin the pauper's grave and nobody
talked about him.
And no, let's let's get on withall this good science and shut
(18:59):
up the madman Engineering andone of his figures in his
mythological works his longermythological works was a force
called Euryzen.
Euryzen to mean E reason, andthat was that big uh painting
(19:21):
that he made.
That looks like what a lot ofpeople think god.
Looks like the old man with thebig white beard, uh bending
down to measure with his hand.
Oh yeah, the ancient of dayspainting, ancient of days image.
And that's your reason yeah andum that was his view of what
(19:42):
reason had become had become akind of handmaiden to
engineering and patriarchy,whereas all the real interesting
energy in history when he wascoming of age, because he was
born in the 1750s, was in theAmerican Revolution and in the
French Revolution, in which theold authorities were being
(20:07):
overthrown by the people, freedfrom having to listen, you know,
get their religion from theirpriests and getting their
politics from the king.
The divine right of kings wasbeing, you know, questioned and
(20:29):
overthrown.
And so he really picked up onthat energy and thought that
Christ was the ultimateliberator.
He was a little skeptical ofthe French Revolution, whereas a
lot of the romantic, likeWordsworth, had a lot of hope
(20:50):
that the French Revolution wouldbring about, you know,
spiritual revolution.
But Blake thought that wasunlikely unless there was a
marriage of heaven and hell anda synthesis of innocence with
experience into a third level,which is the second innocence
(21:11):
born of the Gospels.
And the second innocence in theGospels is being born again in
Christ, which is what Blake wassort of totally into.
But he thought that thatrebirth was a rebirth of the
(21:34):
human imagination on the farside of the skepticism and
Machiavellian rationalism ofexperience.
So that's why he has innocenceand experience, because they're
the two steps that lead to theChristian revelation in the
(21:58):
Gospels.
But another way of putting thisis that he wrote the Songs of
Innocence first.
He had no idea he was going towrite the Songs of Experience.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Can you outline what those are Like?
I mean, just tell us what theyare.
I mean Not like you don't haveto outline them.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Well, they're a collection of poems he wrote.
His first poems were poeticals,he called them poetic sketches,
and they were celebrations ofbeauty and innocence in nature
and in morality and in man man.
And he illustrated these poemswith his own engravings and then
(22:43):
did watercolor on top of theengravings and then published
100 copies or more, or about 100copies of each of these books
and that was sort of his entryinto literature and poetry.
And apparently at the timemaking an engraved book of
(23:09):
poetry all on your own, you know, was pretty rare because it
required a lot of craftsmanship,which he learned as an
apprentice, as a printer, and itrequired a lot of artistic
skill, it required a lot ofpoetic skill, it required a lot
of thinking, and so those firstbooks came out and he sold 100
(23:36):
copies.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Oh, so those are three.
Copies are left in the museumsin England right now.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, that's awesome and the others are collectibles.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Wow.
Art and poetry mixedSelf-produced art and poetry.
That's really cool.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
And he had collectors back then, you know, guys who
admired his engraving but theydidn't know that he was going to
go quickly out of style theminute he died.
But he stayed around a littlebit, you know, on the fringes.
But let's get into experience,innocence, and we'll look at a
(24:18):
few of them, one or two.
Here were the first things thathe published and then it struck
him that they were begging tobe complemented by the songs of
(24:40):
experience.
Because, as Blake puts it, inSongs of Innocence and
Experience there's two contrarystates of the human soul.
There's man before the fall, orhumanity before the fall and
humanity after the fall, and theinnocent side of man is
(25:03):
represented in Songs ofInnocence, and then the fallen
side of the soul is representedin the Songs of Experience, of
(25:24):
experience.
And then the synthesis of thetranscendence of the two
competing sides of the humansoul then is revealed in the
later books that marry the two,like the marriage of heaven and
hell, and the proverbs from helland works that the everlasting
(25:49):
gospel and works that sort ofshow Blake's own synthesis of
those two contrary states.
So when you're reading hisProverbs from hell he's not
advocating this as that youshould have a that these are
(26:14):
Proverbs that were left out ofthe Bible because Satan wrote
them.
That's not what he's saying.
He's saying that there is awisdom that comes from
experience, that is part of thehuman soul and the human
imagination, that needs to beexpressed in order to be
(26:36):
understood in light of thegospel revelation, and so I
don't pretend to understand.
Oh, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Are you kind of saying that the Proverbs from
hell, which I have not read, arekind of like Proverbs written
from suffering through difficultexperiences and dark nights of
the soul and such?
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yes, or dealing with the fallen world.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Which is actual wisdom.
Like you get wiser as you getolder because you've experienced
more.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Well, it's worldly wisdom.
Yeah, whether it's divinewisdom is another question, and
that's why people have a littlebit of trouble with him, because
how can he see wisdom in achild, wisdom in an experienced
old man and then a divine wisdomthat incorporates and
(27:36):
transcends both all at the sametime?
That requires a kind of leap ofthe imagination and a reach of
a different conception of Godthan maybe people find in Milton
, paradise Lost or even in Dante.
(27:57):
So the reason I bring thoseguys up is that he did
illustrations for Paradise Lostand he did illustrations for
Dante's Divine Comedy, but theillustrations were designed to
reveal his take on thelimitations of Melton's view of
(28:21):
Paradise Lost.
And in fact he wrote a longpoem called Melton in which he
substitutes his view ofChristianity and Christ and the
soul in opposition to Milton,yet at the same time says that
(28:44):
Milton is the greatest writer inEnglish other than Shakespeare.
And he didn't do anyillustrations of Shakespeare.
I don't know if he did, hemight have done some Shakespeare
.
I don't know if he did, hemight have done some Shakespeare
.
But he's more known for his longpoem on Milton and his long
(29:06):
poem on Dante, in which hesubtitles it A Justification of
the Ways of God to man, becausethat point you made when you
were talking about how he didn'tbelieve in hell.
(29:26):
It was more, that he believedthat hell was a creation of the
human soul and blamed on Satan.
Right, and that are blamed onGod, and if anybody created hell
it was Satan, it wasn't God.
And so part of his poem, melton, is not a replay of Paradise
(29:54):
Lost but a philosophicaldialogue with Melton, much as it
is a poem on Dante.
Now, I'm not an expert in Blake,it would take years.
I'm sure there are people whohave spent their lives trying to
read Melton and sort ofunderstand his you mean Blake?
Yeah, people read Blake's poem.
(30:17):
Melton is a critique ofMilton's Paradise Lost and that
form of sort of AnglicanChristianity from his sort of
proto-visionary romantic pointof view, and so it brings
(30:45):
Christianity into a conversationwith its literary and mythic
past, not its new sciences.
Once you start bringingChristianity into a conversation
with the new sciences, theneverything turns on epistemology
.
What can you know?
You know what is certainty, youknow what is empiricism and you
(31:08):
know, okay, what is thehistoric.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
For our listeners.
Epistemology is the study ofhow things are known.
How do you know things?
Speaker 1 (31:16):
How do you know things?
And we don't have anyphotographs of Jesus.
So how do we know he evenexisted things?
And we don't have anyphotographs of Jesus.
So how do we know he evenexisted?
And can we find the carbon-14datings of the resurrection or
something?
And that's all in dialogue withenlightenment.
Reason and interesting thingshave emerged from it, but Blake
(31:38):
wasn't interested in that.
He was interested in theChristian faith as a critique or
as a elaboration of myth andimagination.
So let's go into this a littlebit with the charge of being mad
, because part of the madness isthat he didn't believe in a
(32:04):
round earth.
I can understand that.
But he was also kind of becausehe was poor and because he
didn't hang with the middleclass enlightenment crowd, his
faith seemed superstitious.
(32:25):
But he was also a visionary whohad visions of God, since he
was four years old, and so therewas oh, sorry, before we go
further into the madness and thevisions.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
I had a question about with innocence and
experience.
You know he's saying man beforethe fall, man after the fall,
but in the intro you know weacknowledged he didn't believe
in original sin.
Does that just mean like hedidn't believe in, he believed
in the fall, that the fall hadaffected mankind but he just
(33:02):
didn't believe in like someproper way of understanding
original sin?
Because understanding,understanding that man is
falling You're asking anon-Blake expert.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
So let me just tell you, having taught him as a poet
and trying to explain this to,like, a diverse audience in a
secular university, yeah.
To say he didn't believe inoriginal sin might be.
(33:35):
It's both too weak and toostrong a take on him.
Too weak and too strong a takeon him.
He didn't believe that thecontemporary explanations of the
fall as something that God lethappen, or God's role in that or
God's relationship to Satan wasfor him a question about the
(34:04):
human imagination and humanimaginative capacity.
It's sort of like the firsttime around you got to believe
it literally because you'reseven years old and you just
talk to God through the windowin your bedroom.
But then, when you're 14, theimages change on you and Blake
(34:27):
as he matured and as he showedhis experiences with living in a
London slum where he saw theexploitation of children and the
chimney sweeps and being soldby their parents to people to
clean their chimneys for fivecents an hour, coming out of
(34:52):
them with soot.
Where does this evil come from?
These are good Christian slaveowners.
These are good Christian slaveowners and this is something
that has to be dealt with, noton a deistic, theological,
getting the logic straight sothat contemporary Christianity
(35:14):
fits with classical metaphysics.
This is more about how.
What would Jesus have said ifhe were in my shoes?
Or what do I say when I putmyself in Jesus's shoes.
And that requires a littleimagination, yes, right, and he
becomes a writer and aliterature and stories, and so
(35:38):
you know, so he writes the poemsof innocence and putting
himself in the shoes of theinnocent, which could be, you
could think of it as his.
You know, he starts with theSermon on the Mount and then he
moves into the Gospels andRevelation and the other stuff
is trying to talk about.
(36:00):
You know, from his point ofview, how can you have a church,
celebrate the poor chimneysweeps of Britain by having Holy
Thursday and they invite allthe orphans into the church and
they put them in a choir andthey sing hymns and then, after
(36:22):
Holy Thursday, they send themout into the street to beg and
to work as a chimney sweep.
These were two contradictorystates of the human soul.
Where did they come from?
Right, and for him and for him,there is much a creation of the
(36:45):
human imagination as anythingelse.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
I mean, that's about as relevant as you can get to
modern day.
I think so he can't justify thechurch's playing church, while
this injustice is just fine withthem.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Right.
So he has to tell the story ofthe everlasting gospel, and
that's that where he tells thestory of Jesus as a child and
follows the gospel story throughas if he were one of the
characters in Innocence andExperience.
And if you don't know that, ifyou think that he's got some
(37:31):
theology that he's trying toexpress through these poems,
that this is his project 2025for England or something, that's
not it at all, because hedidn't even know he was going to
write these poems aboutexperience until he wrote the
ones about innocence, and hedidn't even know he was going to
(37:52):
write the Marriage of Heavenand Hell until he wrote the
poems of innocence andexperience.
So he's an artist that'sgrowing into his own vision and
it's changing.
And then he reads Milton'sParadise Lost and he says this
is the greatest writer inEngland, but he's got things
(38:13):
wrong in shaping the humanexperience than he admits.
And so he doesn't know how tomake a Christian anything other
than a docile believer insteadof a creative force in the
(38:33):
culture at large, and thatcreative force has to be
somebody who engages themythology of the age.
There's one other example ofthis and where the long poems
came from, because he didn'tjust read Milton and decide he
was going to write a long poem.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
What do you mean by long poem?
Speaker 1 (38:56):
A poem that's over two pages long.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
that's over two pages long.
Okay, yeah, the EverlastingGospel.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
It's like 20, 30 pages long, I think, jerusalem.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
I think is his longest poem.
This one was eight pages.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Eight pages the.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Everlasting Gospel.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
I read it.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, eight pages we could handle, but one of those
long poems was 100 plates long,wow, so it was about the length
of a novel.
And it was illustrated and ithad poems on every page.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Wow, that's unbelievable.
Just as a prolific artist.
Even that's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Well, he's got in Jerusalem.
He talks about how he wrote thepoem and he said it was
entirely dictated to by the HolySpirit and that he would only
work on it in 15, 25 minuteperiods and it was totally
(40:00):
effortless periods, and it wastotally effortless and he didn't
have to do any revision or muchand it's, it was published as
it came to him, um, on the wingsof the divine, as he understood
it, sort of like the way bobdellin describes those early
albums that he wrote, yeah, andand when we get to the, when we
(40:22):
talk about the 60s because Iknow we're taking a lot of time
on this, but we can edit thisdown the longer poems grew out
of these allegorical poems thathe wrote and he invented these
characters that would stand forcertain mental states, spiritual
states.
So innocence and experience aremental states, right for him,
(40:49):
or states of the soul, twocontrary states of the soul.
But your reason that God thathe drew that looked like what we
think of as a man with a beard.
Your Reason was a kind ofmental, spiritual force, the
calculative, engineering,control, your environment, force
(41:12):
that plays in the human mind sopowerfully.
And then he had other forces,like Eutherian, which was the
creative side, that wasunfolding and creating realities
and not just trying to inventand manage experience.
(41:37):
And so those all come intoconversation with one another
and they become ways that hethinks things through, kind of
like the images of Narnia or thecharacters in other forms of
fiction, where they allrepresent different human types
(42:01):
and you watch the writer playout their view of how the world
works based on these images.
And probably the best one that Iused to use in class was the
book of Fell, and I told youthat Blake and his wife lost a
child in a miscarriage and italways plagued Blake that this
(42:28):
happened.
Blake also wrote his version ofJob, in which he characterizes
the comforters in terms ofcontemporary British people that
might try to explain to you whyyou deserve your suffering.
(42:51):
When he lost, he decided he wasgoing to write an allegorical
poem about why he lost a childin miscarriage.
So he imagines a unborn spirit,the spirit of his unborn child,
(43:14):
thel.
No-transcript.
Now you know this is Blake whowrites like this.
(43:35):
Right, I mean, this is powerfulstuff.
So Thel doesn't want to be born.
The virgins of the virgins, theunborn babies, is trying to
(44:00):
tell her.
You know, you shouldn't beworried about being born.
It's a wonderful place.
You know you go down to earthand you know you meet clouds and
there are animals and there arepeople.
And the unborn says, well, yes,but there's also death.
(44:25):
Or his unborn child fell.
He says there's also death andI don't want to be born just to
die.
And so the angel comes and it'sa great little poem.
(44:47):
I'm not going to read the wholething, but I'm going to read a
section from it.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Okay, ok.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
And so the angel says well, you know when you're,
(45:21):
when you're a human being, youknow, you, you have, you're
going to be born as a humanbeing and you're going to be
God's immortal child and you'regoing to go down to Earth and
think of all the other entitiesyou're going to meet on Earth.
This is kind of like theBuddhist, what is it?
Jharka stories, but anyway, soyou can see why.
If you didn't know how to takethese voices from experience and
(45:43):
essence, or know that thecharacters that Blake is
describing are mental states andthat these are psychological
allegories of spiritualdevelopment, you might just
think that this is like therantings of a crazy man, and
(46:03):
especially when everybody or noteverybody, but most of even the
people that took him seriouslyas a poet thought that he didn't
make any sense, it wasn'tcoherent in the big picture.
And it was only 100 years afterhe died that people began to
(46:29):
take him seriously, both hisshort and long poems seriously,
both his short and long poems.
And the reason for that is inthose 100 years, particularly
because the first serious bookof Blake, literary criticism,
came out in around 1924, I think1927, 100 years after his death
(46:52):
.
You needed to have AlbertEinstein's theory of relativity
be taken seriously in terms andin phrasing that are not just a
commonplace speech of everydayman.
That was the kind of poetrythat was popular and emerging in
(47:24):
Blake's time, for this reallycomplicated, visionary kind of
poetry that you only see in theBible or in Book of Revelations
and so in Book of Thel, just togive you an example of this.
So you read it and it startsand it seems kind of like what's
(47:46):
going on here, because it's alot of symbolic language, like a
Dylan, a lot of symboliclanguage like a Dylan early
Dylan album or something youknow.
And but if you hang in there,you know and you have a little
bit of reading, readers,endurance lines will emerge
later that become the lines thatare quoted and in front of
(48:10):
every book you've ever read inthe last hundred years, quoting
Blake, and you wonder where theycame from and you wonder what
the context is, but there'snobody there to tell you because
he's being misread as atheologian, he's being misread
as a romantic poet, which hewasn't, and so all of this stuff
(48:34):
.
It took till the 20s to havehis advocates.
And then, after there was, abook came out by a guy named
Fraser Damon called thePhilosophy and Symbolism of
William Blake.
I think it was 1920s, 24.
And that was the first bookthat took him seriously and that
(48:59):
made him famous.
And ever since that timethere's been more and more books
.
He's become more and morefamous.
And I just heard a Britishhistorian the other day rank the
top writers in the Englishlanguage and it had Blake number
one, shakespeare number two,milton number three, which blew
(49:24):
my mind, because that is amazing, and I think part of that is
that neuroscience is finallycatching up with the madness of
William Blake.
And the reason I say that isthat we have a couple of
accounts of people that knewBlake when he was alive and
(49:45):
talked to them, talked to him.
And one was William Wordsworth,who was the great poet that
wrote the preface to lyricalballads and was the greatest
romantic poet of ever.
I imagine he createdromanticism in England and he
(50:06):
went and saw Blake because hewas wondering do I have any
precursors?
Are there anybody else in theworld that ever thought that
poetry was about the statementsof the visionary imagination
rather than just accounts ofeveryday experience?
And so he went to talk to Blakeand afterwards I asked him what
(50:30):
he said and he said well, thepoor man is as mad as a hatter,
but I would take the genius ofhis madness over the sanity of
Lord Byron or Sir Walter Scott.
So there's a grudgingrecognition that this guy's a
(50:53):
genius.
But they still had to put inthis, you know, undermine him by
calling him a madman, and thatmade it harder for his readers
to take the long work seriously,to take the time to sort of
unpack the symbolism, which isabout as hard as the symbolism
(51:17):
in Dillon.
And if you want to understandBob Dillon's early stuff, you
got to unpack the symbolism.
But if you love the music,you'll do it.
But if somebody told you, yeah,I tried it, it doesn't make any
sense.
He's crazy.
That would sort of underminehis ability to win the nobel
prize, right, but um, but thatdidn't happen.
(51:41):
So getting back to phil, sophil actually.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
So I have a question, because not a question, but a
comment.
You, okay, you pointed out whatwords were said about him, and
it it sounds like whatchesterton said about him too.
So chesterton said critics sayblake's visions were false
because he was mad.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
I say he was mad because his visions were true
well, see, uh, that's acompliment to blake, but you
have to look at hear it.
It through Blake's ears to hearit as a compliment.
Having visions doesn't proveyou're crazy.
A culture that has no use forvisions is crazy, and most
(52:24):
cultures in the history ofhumanity have had visionaries
and prophets and dreams andhallucinations that haven't been
just written off as atomsbumping into atoms, but as
opportunities to exercise theirown imagination, either in
painting or art or even justself-understanding.
Speaker 3 (52:50):
Well, thank you, professor, for this part one of
Blake, and we have a whole lotmore coming in part two.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
Well, we could go forever on this guy.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
As you can see, yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
I mean, he's a world unto himself.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Yeah, blake so far is very exciting and he's quite a
psychedelic madman.
Well, thank you so much and Ilook forward to the next episode
with you.
Okay, travis, thank you,bye-bye.
There's something here for allof you, whether you're a skeptic
or a believer or somewhere inbetween.
With some deconstructionjourney, we're going to be
(53:28):
exploring what this means tohave a life of deep meaning in a
world that feels increasinglyfragmented and dealing with
nihilism.
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy podcast.
Don't forget to subscribe andshare this with anyone who might
find these conversationsmeaningful.
This has been a SubversiveOrthodoxy podcast with Travis
(53:53):
Mullen and Professor Enchastithe world's lies.
Speaker 2 (54:15):
Meanwhile, I'm fine, looking through a stained glass
oceanic scene, say hi to humanbeings with a smile unseen,
grabbing wildflowers as I slidedown hills.
After a rain, after some pain,after the same I'm to blame love
in my veins through syringesuntamed like dosage doesn't
matter.
Inject these veins people gotproblems and the world's got
more makes you wonder what theheck I was put on this earth for
.
Having visions doesn't prove you're crazy.
A culture that has no use forvisions is crazy.
Off as atoms bumping into atoms, but as opportunities to
(00:30):
exercise their own imaginationeither in painting or art, or
even just self-understanding.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast.
I'm your host, Travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
Aversive Orthodoxy podcast.
I'm your host, Travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we, as humans,withstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
(01:00):
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
It's great entertainment, thrilling
entertainment.
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Sometimes, when I get bored, Ilike to fly above the clouds and
I ask the Lord what does ittake to get down?
And every time I ask, heteaches me the same thing.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Just bleed originality.
On this episode, we're going toexplore two of the most
imaginative and rebellious mindsof their time, william Blake
and Johann von Goethe.
Both were deeply concerned withthe rise of Enlightenment
rationalism, a movement thatemphasized reason, empirical
observation and mechanisticexplanations of the universe.
While these new ways ofthinking brought incredible
(02:06):
scientific advancements, theyalso, in Blake and Goethe's eyes
, stripped the world of its soul.
Both men fought to reclaim theimagination, myth and the
transcendent from a worldincreasingly defined by logic
and materialism.
But while they sought toreinvigorate spiritual life,
their relationship withChristian doctrine was
(02:26):
unorthodox, complex and at timessubversive.
To understand theircontributions, we have to set
the stage.
The late 18th and early 19thcenturies saw the dominance of
the new sciences, championed bythinkers like Newton, descartes
and Locke.
The natural world was nowexplained in terms of
predictable laws, and reason wasseen as the highest authority.
(02:48):
Even theology was shifting,with deism proposing a distant,
uninvolved creator rather thanan incarnate, personal God.
In England, blake saw the statechurch as rigid and moralistic,
while in Germany, goethe wasresponding to a Protestant
landscape that had become overlyintellectualized and
systematized.
Both sought a return tosomething deeper, something more
(03:09):
alive.
Blake, born in 1757, was avisionary poet, artist and
engraver, who claimed to havemystical experiences from
childhood.
He saw Enlightenment,rationalism, as a form of
enslavement that stifled humancreativity and spiritual vision.
His works, like Songs ofInnocence and Experience and the
(03:29):
Marriage of Heaven and Hell,presented a radical alternative
to the prevailing worldview.
For Blake, imagination wasdivine and Christ was the
ultimate symbol of creativeliberation.
However, his theology was farfrom orthodox.
He rejected original sin, helland the idea of a punitive God.
He saw traditional Christianmorality as oppressive and
(03:51):
instead proposed a faithcentered on creative freedom.
Playwright, scientist andstatesman, his masterpiece,
faust, wrestled with the tensionbetween reason and
transcendence, ultimatelysuggesting that salvation comes
not from faith alone but fromhuman striving.
(04:13):
While fascinated by Jesus,goethe rejected the Trinity, the
resurrection and miracles,embracing instead a pantheistic
view of God as a force withinnature.
Though he valued spirituality,his approach was more
philosophical than doctrinal.
Both Blake and Goethe wereintellectual rebels, challenging
the dominance of rationalismand fighting to restore the
(04:35):
imagination to its rightfulplace.
While they sought to keep thedivine alive in the modern world
, they often stood outside thetraditional Christian orthodoxy.
Yet their critiques remaindeeply relevant today, reminding
us that faith is not just asystem of beliefs but an
encounter with mystery, beautyand the transformative power of
the imagination.
With no further ado, I'd liketo welcome Professor Larry.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Thank you, travis, great to be with you.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
How are you doing this week?
Speaker 1 (05:03):
I'm doing great.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Are you ready to talk about some crazy guys?
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Well, yeah, let's talk about Blakey and Madden.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Under the heading of those first five people, the
Soul Under Siege.
Can you tell us what were youthinking with Blake?
He's very unorthodox and samewith Goethe.
How did they make it into yourbook?
Speaker 1 (05:23):
and same with Goethe.
How did they make it into yourbook?
Well, they are two people, twoartists and philosophers and
major figures in the Westerncanon, who were Christian in
their came out of Christiancultures, thought of themselves
as Christian in their worldview,understood themselves, however
nitpicking theologians might beas to their orthodoxy, embraced
(05:48):
what they considered a Christianworldview in conflict with the
new enlightenment energies, andthey were trying to sort of see
how they fit and what these newdeist ideas or Kant's religion
within the bounds of reasonalone, meant for themselves as
(06:14):
artists and as human beings andas people with really
existential problems, which theydidn't have the word
existential, we'll get into thatlater.
But they set the ground forthat by trying to find where
they fit in.
They started elaboratingspiritual psychologies, both of
(06:39):
them more than theologies andmore than theological debates.
They were more interested indeveloping a spiritual
psychology and of coursepsychology didn't exist yet.
So a lot of their ideas camefrom being in dialogue with,
(06:59):
let's say, religious spiritualdirectors and Protestant pastors
and Catholic contemplatives andpeople that were not academic
theologians by any means.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Did you?
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
When you say they were almost creating a
psychology, do you think thatwas like they were trying to
speak to something that theycould feel like they?
They sense this need toidentify the psyche, or they
needed to understand why theirpsyche was so spiritual, or what
do you think was happeningthere?
If psychology if psychologywasn't a word yet really really?
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yes, I think the latter.
I think that they felt thatsomething was being left out of
the equation that emphasizedmeasurement and calculation in
calculation, and particularlypoetry and literature, which
(08:06):
were and for Blake, theimagination, artistic
imagination, painting andengraving more than syllogisms,
spoke to the Christian vision.
I think somewhere in Blake andI was looking for it, but I
never found it he says that, inorder to be a Christian,
(08:37):
christians understand Christthrough the imagination.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And so it's an imaginative.
What do you think he means bythat?
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Well that it's an imaginative act, to, to have
(09:02):
faith in, to see in Jesussomething more than a failed
political leader or somebodywith a set of ethical ideas,
because the Gospels invite youto a different, imaginative
conception of the whole.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
So let me ask I'm trying to grasp this Do you
think they're saying living byfaith or having faith is
actually almost synonymous orvery similar to imagination?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Well, blake, yes, explicitly says that.
Okay, goethe is a little bitmore indirect, but we'll talk
about him another time.
But Blake, one of the greatthings about Blake, and one of
(09:52):
the things that why I put himfirst and why we're talking
about him today, is that he'snot one of those people that you
can read on your own, andeverybody knows that.
He's central to the Westerncanon and becoming more and more
(10:14):
central to Western literatureas we speak.
But when you try to read him orwhen you you get into some of
those long works that Blakewrote and he uses this own
(10:36):
jargon of his own invention, hecan be kind of confusing and
especially with this mixture ofheaven and hell and innocence
and experience and, as youpointed out, some ideas that
just don't make sense to acontemporary person.
(10:59):
Like there was a period wherehe he didn't believe in the the
uh round earth.
Uh, he was a flat earther, uh,and, and that's you know, if
you're a contemporary, that's,it's kind of hard to take
seriously somebody who whodoesn't believe that the earth
is round.
That that's made a resurgencelately.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Yeah yeah.
There's people who say that now.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Maybe he'll have a comeback as a literal figure.
And then also, though thedoctrinal denominational
squabbles and academictheological battles don't
(11:47):
necessarily know how to enterinto, some of these poems that
seem written in the voices ofangels or stories about his
conversations with angels, andthese kinds of things are a
little hard to get.
(12:10):
But I hope today we can justsort of sweep away some of the
problems that people have withthat, to get at what is still
there in him worth payingattention to, and things that
Blake says that nobody else hassaid or that don't make any
(12:33):
sense, because he's sayingsomething that doesn't fit into
our time and that our time ismissing a capacity to understand
myth and symbol he doesn't notunderstand.
It isn't his problem that he'snot a total literalist in his
(12:54):
ability to explain that you canlearn more about religious faith
going to Sistine Chapel orlooking at his illustrations for
Dante's Inferno than you can inreading a, you know, a treatise
refuting the logic of myth orsomething.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Well, it's it's.
It is relevant that we'retalking about it because those
are issues that are currentlyhappening, like the art.
The Christian artist world issaying, like how did we lose art
?
Like it used to be important inthe church, and the world knows
that the, the secular world,goes to these temples, in these
(13:35):
churches, in these cathedrals,like in Spain I went to the.
Oh man, I can't remember thename, it's got a crazy name the
big, beautiful, beautiful one inSpain, and it's just a work of
art completely, and it was tothe glory of God, you know, in
architecture, and so many were.
And then we got intoutilitarianism because of the
(13:57):
timeframe that Blake is speakingat Exactly.
So that's art, but then alsomysticism and symbol.
We know nothing of that.
We are so, whether we like itor not, as Americans we have,
even if we believe in prayer,we're so unmystical that we
(14:20):
barely pray because we cannotcomprehend things that don't
actually are not met.
You can't record it withmetrics or money, like you can't
record.
You can't record how effective aprayer was or an encounter with
jesus it becomes a self-helppractice, you know yeah, rather
than a mystical practice, um sowhile I don't I don't fully
(14:44):
understand what blake is saying,yet I can feel its relevance,
as you, as you unpack him and asyou know, as I've read the
chapter, I could, I could feelthe relevance, you know, despite
the, you know, unorthodox inhis, in his primary theology.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
But or is, or his physics and geography, yeah, his
view of the earth.
Okay, this is one way ofthinking of it.
And let's go into his biographya little bit.
Blake wanted to be a painterbut he dropped out of school at
(15:27):
10 and got apprenticed to anengraver and took a trade which
he hoped would help him.
You know, get married and havea family.
And he married a illiteratewoman who couldn't read, and
they had one child who died in amiscarriage, a girl.
(15:53):
So he never had any children.
He and his wife lived in atwo-room apartment in London
with a little garden in the back, pretty much in poverty.
And his whole life.
In fact, one of thedescriptions of one of the
critics that came to visit himthat had seen one of his
(16:16):
artworks at the Royal Academywhere he had his works at one
time, and he called it squalor Ithink that might be a little
too strong, but he said thatBlake was living in squalor and
(16:36):
throughout his life he was neveraccepted.
He was considered kind of acrazy guy, a religious fanatic,
and when he died he was buriedin an unmarked grave.
They dug him, re-dug him, dughim up and re-buried him in the
(17:08):
dissenter's graveyard in.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
London.
Is it a specific graveyard fordissenters?
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah.
I don't know if they call itdissenters, know if they they
call it the centers.
They also call it somethinglike um uh, not counterculture,
but um uh, contrarians orsomething.
They have a, they have a wholeum a cemetery there, uh, and so
(17:36):
he's, he's there, and and now hehas a nice, uh, big, big burial
site with his name and hisdates and there's a statue of
him in Canterbury Cathedral.
Is it Canterbury?
What's the one that has all thewriters buried?
(18:00):
That's Canterbury, right?
I'm not sure, because hisstatue is staring at Dryden,
which is kind of a joke, becauseDryden is such a rationalist.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Well no, he's staring him down forever, then yeah,
but anyway.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
so why I bring this up is oh is it.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Westminster Abbey Poet's Corner.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yes, yes, that's what it is.
Oh cool, there's a statue onhim, Westminster Abbey.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
If our listeners have a place of pilgrimage.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
If they go to England .
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yes, sort of like well, anyway, anyway, so let's
get up, so anyway, that, um then, after he died, he was totally
forgotten.
It was, like you know, put himin the pauper's grave and nobody
talked about him.
And no, let's let's get on withall this good science and shut
(18:59):
up the madman Engineering andone of his figures in his
mythological works his longermythological works was a force
called Euryzen.
Euryzen to mean E reason, andthat was that big uh painting
(19:21):
that he made.
That looks like what a lot ofpeople think god.
Looks like the old man with thebig white beard, uh bending
down to measure with his hand.
Oh yeah, the ancient of dayspainting, ancient of days image.
And that's your reason yeah andum that was his view of what
(19:42):
reason had become had become akind of handmaiden to
engineering and patriarchy,whereas all the real interesting
energy in history when he wascoming of age, because he was
born in the 1750s, was in theAmerican Revolution and in the
French Revolution, in which theold authorities were being
(20:07):
overthrown by the people, freedfrom having to listen, you know,
get their religion from theirpriests and getting their
politics from the king.
The divine right of kings wasbeing, you know, questioned and
(20:29):
overthrown.
And so he really picked up onthat energy and thought that
Christ was the ultimateliberator.
He was a little skeptical ofthe French Revolution, whereas a
lot of the romantic, likeWordsworth, had a lot of hope
(20:50):
that the French Revolution wouldbring about, you know,
spiritual revolution.
But Blake thought that wasunlikely unless there was a
marriage of heaven and hell anda synthesis of innocence with
experience into a third level,which is the second innocence
(21:11):
born of the Gospels.
And the second innocence in theGospels is being born again in
Christ, which is what Blake wassort of totally into.
But he thought that thatrebirth was a rebirth of the
(21:34):
human imagination on the farside of the skepticism and
Machiavellian rationalism ofexperience.
So that's why he has innocenceand experience, because they're
the two steps that lead to theChristian revelation in the
(21:58):
Gospels.
But another way of putting thisis that he wrote the Songs of
Innocence first.
He had no idea he was going towrite the Songs of Experience.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Can you outline what those are Like?
I mean, just tell us what theyare.
I mean Not like you don't haveto outline them.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Well, they're a collection of poems he wrote.
His first poems were poeticals,he called them poetic sketches,
and they were celebrations ofbeauty and innocence in nature
and in morality and in man man.
And he illustrated these poemswith his own engravings and then
(22:43):
did watercolor on top of theengravings and then published
100 copies or more, or about 100copies of each of these books
and that was sort of his entryinto literature and poetry.
And apparently at the timemaking an engraved book of
(23:09):
poetry all on your own, you know, was pretty rare because it
required a lot of craftsmanship,which he learned as an
apprentice, as a printer, and itrequired a lot of artistic
skill, it required a lot ofpoetic skill, it required a lot
of thinking, and so those firstbooks came out and he sold 100
(23:36):
copies.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Oh, so those are three.
Copies are left in the museumsin England right now.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, that's awesome and the others are collectibles.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Wow.
Art and poetry mixedSelf-produced art and poetry.
That's really cool.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
And he had collectors back then, you know, guys who
admired his engraving but theydidn't know that he was going to
go quickly out of style theminute he died.
But he stayed around a littlebit, you know, on the fringes.
But let's get into experience,innocence, and we'll look at a
(24:18):
few of them, one or two.
Here were the first things thathe published and then it struck
him that they were begging tobe complemented by the songs of
(24:40):
experience.
Because, as Blake puts it, inSongs of Innocence and
Experience there's two contrarystates of the human soul.
There's man before the fall, orhumanity before the fall and
humanity after the fall, and theinnocent side of man is
(25:03):
represented in Songs ofInnocence, and then the fallen
side of the soul is representedin the Songs of Experience, of
(25:24):
experience.
And then the synthesis of thetranscendence of the two
competing sides of the humansoul then is revealed in the
later books that marry the two,like the marriage of heaven and
hell, and the proverbs from helland works that the everlasting
(25:49):
gospel and works that sort ofshow Blake's own synthesis of
those two contrary states.
So when you're reading hisProverbs from hell he's not
advocating this as that youshould have a that these are
(26:14):
Proverbs that were left out ofthe Bible because Satan wrote
them.
That's not what he's saying.
He's saying that there is awisdom that comes from
experience, that is part of thehuman soul and the human
imagination, that needs to beexpressed in order to be
(26:36):
understood in light of thegospel revelation, and so I
don't pretend to understand.
Oh, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Are you kind of saying that the Proverbs from
hell, which I have not read, arekind of like Proverbs written
from suffering through difficultexperiences and dark nights of
the soul and such?
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yes, or dealing with the fallen world.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Which is actual wisdom.
Like you get wiser as you getolder because you've experienced
more.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Well, it's worldly wisdom.
Yeah, whether it's divinewisdom is another question, and
that's why people have a littlebit of trouble with him, because
how can he see wisdom in achild, wisdom in an experienced
old man and then a divine wisdomthat incorporates and
(27:36):
transcends both all at the sametime?
That requires a kind of leap ofthe imagination and a reach of
a different conception of Godthan maybe people find in Milton
, paradise Lost or even in Dante.
(27:57):
So the reason I bring thoseguys up is that he did
illustrations for Paradise Lostand he did illustrations for
Dante's Divine Comedy, but theillustrations were designed to
reveal his take on thelimitations of Melton's view of
(28:21):
Paradise Lost.
And in fact he wrote a longpoem called Melton in which he
substitutes his view ofChristianity and Christ and the
soul in opposition to Milton,yet at the same time says that
(28:44):
Milton is the greatest writer inEnglish other than Shakespeare.
And he didn't do anyillustrations of Shakespeare.
I don't know if he did, hemight have done some Shakespeare
.
I don't know if he did, hemight have done some Shakespeare
.
But he's more known for his longpoem on Milton and his long
(29:06):
poem on Dante, in which hesubtitles it A Justification of
the Ways of God to man, becausethat point you made when you
were talking about how he didn'tbelieve in hell.
(29:26):
It was more, that he believedthat hell was a creation of the
human soul and blamed on Satan.
Right, and that are blamed onGod, and if anybody created hell
it was Satan, it wasn't God.
And so part of his poem, melton, is not a replay of Paradise
(29:54):
Lost but a philosophicaldialogue with Melton, much as it
is a poem on Dante.
Now, I'm not an expert in Blake,it would take years.
I'm sure there are people whohave spent their lives trying to
read Melton and sort ofunderstand his you mean Blake?
Yeah, people read Blake's poem.
(30:17):
Melton is a critique ofMilton's Paradise Lost and that
form of sort of AnglicanChristianity from his sort of
proto-visionary romantic pointof view, and so it brings
(30:45):
Christianity into a conversationwith its literary and mythic
past, not its new sciences.
Once you start bringingChristianity into a conversation
with the new sciences, theneverything turns on epistemology
.
What can you know?
You know what is certainty, youknow what is empiricism and you
(31:08):
know, okay, what is thehistoric.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
For our listeners.
Epistemology is the study ofhow things are known.
How do you know things?
Speaker 1 (31:16):
How do you know things?
And we don't have anyphotographs of Jesus.
So how do we know he evenexisted things?
And we don't have anyphotographs of Jesus.
So how do we know he evenexisted?
And can we find the carbon-14datings of the resurrection or
something?
And that's all in dialogue withenlightenment.
Reason and interesting thingshave emerged from it, but Blake
(31:38):
wasn't interested in that.
He was interested in theChristian faith as a critique or
as a elaboration of myth andimagination.
So let's go into this a littlebit with the charge of being mad
, because part of the madness isthat he didn't believe in a
(32:04):
round earth.
I can understand that.
But he was also kind of becausehe was poor and because he
didn't hang with the middleclass enlightenment crowd, his
faith seemed superstitious.
(32:25):
But he was also a visionary whohad visions of God, since he
was four years old, and so therewas oh, sorry, before we go
further into the madness and thevisions.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
I had a question about with innocence and
experience.
You know he's saying man beforethe fall, man after the fall,
but in the intro you know weacknowledged he didn't believe
in original sin.
Does that just mean like hedidn't believe in, he believed
in the fall, that the fall hadaffected mankind but he just
(33:02):
didn't believe in like someproper way of understanding
original sin?
Because understanding,understanding that man is
falling You're asking anon-Blake expert.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
So let me just tell you, having taught him as a poet
and trying to explain this to,like, a diverse audience in a
secular university, yeah.
To say he didn't believe inoriginal sin might be.
(33:35):
It's both too weak and toostrong a take on him.
Too weak and too strong a takeon him.
He didn't believe that thecontemporary explanations of the
fall as something that God lethappen, or God's role in that or
God's relationship to Satan wasfor him a question about the
(34:04):
human imagination and humanimaginative capacity.
It's sort of like the firsttime around you got to believe
it literally because you'reseven years old and you just
talk to God through the windowin your bedroom.
But then, when you're 14, theimages change on you and Blake
(34:27):
as he matured and as he showedhis experiences with living in a
London slum where he saw theexploitation of children and the
chimney sweeps and being soldby their parents to people to
clean their chimneys for fivecents an hour, coming out of
(34:52):
them with soot.
Where does this evil come from?
These are good Christian slaveowners.
These are good Christian slaveowners and this is something
that has to be dealt with, noton a deistic, theological,
getting the logic straight sothat contemporary Christianity
(35:14):
fits with classical metaphysics.
This is more about how.
What would Jesus have said ifhe were in my shoes?
Or what do I say when I putmyself in Jesus's shoes.
And that requires a littleimagination, yes, right, and he
becomes a writer and aliterature and stories, and so
(35:38):
you know, so he writes the poemsof innocence and putting
himself in the shoes of theinnocent, which could be, you
could think of it as his.
You know, he starts with theSermon on the Mount and then he
moves into the Gospels andRevelation and the other stuff
is trying to talk about.
(36:00):
You know, from his point ofview, how can you have a church,
celebrate the poor chimneysweeps of Britain by having Holy
Thursday and they invite allthe orphans into the church and
they put them in a choir andthey sing hymns and then, after
(36:22):
Holy Thursday, they send themout into the street to beg and
to work as a chimney sweep.
These were two contradictorystates of the human soul.
Where did they come from?
Right, and for him and for him,there is much a creation of the
(36:45):
human imagination as anythingelse.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
I mean, that's about as relevant as you can get to
modern day.
I think so he can't justify thechurch's playing church, while
this injustice is just fine withthem.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Right.
So he has to tell the story ofthe everlasting gospel, and
that's that where he tells thestory of Jesus as a child and
follows the gospel story throughas if he were one of the
characters in Innocence andExperience.
And if you don't know that, ifyou think that he's got some
(37:31):
theology that he's trying toexpress through these poems,
that this is his project 2025for England or something, that's
not it at all, because hedidn't even know he was going to
write these poems aboutexperience until he wrote the
ones about innocence, and hedidn't even know he was going to
(37:52):
write the Marriage of Heavenand Hell until he wrote the
poems of innocence andexperience.
So he's an artist that'sgrowing into his own vision and
it's changing.
And then he reads Milton'sParadise Lost and he says this
is the greatest writer inEngland, but he's got things
(38:13):
wrong in shaping the humanexperience than he admits.
And so he doesn't know how tomake a Christian anything other
than a docile believer insteadof a creative force in the
(38:33):
culture at large, and thatcreative force has to be
somebody who engages themythology of the age.
There's one other example ofthis and where the long poems
came from, because he didn'tjust read Milton and decide he
was going to write a long poem.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
What do you mean by long poem?
Speaker 1 (38:56):
A poem that's over two pages long.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
that's over two pages long.
Okay, yeah, the EverlastingGospel.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
It's like 20, 30 pages long, I think, jerusalem.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
I think is his longest poem.
This one was eight pages.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Eight pages the.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
Everlasting Gospel.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
I read it.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, eight pages we could handle, but one of those
long poems was 100 plates long,wow, so it was about the length
of a novel.
And it was illustrated and ithad poems on every page.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Wow, that's unbelievable.
Just as a prolific artist.
Even that's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Well, he's got in Jerusalem.
He talks about how he wrote thepoem and he said it was
entirely dictated to by the HolySpirit and that he would only
work on it in 15, 25 minuteperiods and it was totally
(40:00):
effortless periods, and it wastotally effortless and he didn't
have to do any revision or muchand it's, it was published as
it came to him, um, on the wingsof the divine, as he understood
it, sort of like the way bobdellin describes those early
albums that he wrote, yeah, andand when we get to the, when we
(40:22):
talk about the 60s because Iknow we're taking a lot of time
on this, but we can edit thisdown the longer poems grew out
of these allegorical poems thathe wrote and he invented these
characters that would stand forcertain mental states, spiritual
states.
So innocence and experience aremental states, right for him,
(40:49):
or states of the soul, twocontrary states of the soul.
But your reason that God thathe drew that looked like what we
think of as a man with a beard.
Your Reason was a kind ofmental, spiritual force, the
calculative, engineering,control, your environment, force
(41:12):
that plays in the human mind sopowerfully.
And then he had other forces,like Eutherian, which was the
creative side, that wasunfolding and creating realities
and not just trying to inventand manage experience.
(41:37):
And so those all come intoconversation with one another
and they become ways that hethinks things through, kind of
like the images of Narnia or thecharacters in other forms of
fiction, where they allrepresent different human types
(42:01):
and you watch the writer playout their view of how the world
works based on these images.
And probably the best one that Iused to use in class was the
book of Fell, and I told youthat Blake and his wife lost a
child in a miscarriage and italways plagued Blake that this
(42:28):
happened.
Blake also wrote his version ofJob, in which he characterizes
the comforters in terms ofcontemporary British people that
might try to explain to you whyyou deserve your suffering.
(42:51):
When he lost, he decided he wasgoing to write an allegorical
poem about why he lost a childin miscarriage.
So he imagines a unborn spirit,the spirit of his unborn child,
(43:14):
thel.
No-transcript.
Now you know this is Blake whowrites like this.
(43:35):
Right, I mean, this is powerfulstuff.
So Thel doesn't want to be born.
The virgins of the virgins, theunborn babies, is trying to
(44:00):
tell her.
You know, you shouldn't beworried about being born.
It's a wonderful place.
You know you go down to earthand you know you meet clouds and
there are animals and there arepeople.
And the unborn says, well, yes,but there's also death.
(44:25):
Or his unborn child fell.
He says there's also death andI don't want to be born just to
die.
And so the angel comes and it'sa great little poem.
(44:47):
I'm not going to read the wholething, but I'm going to read a
section from it.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Okay, ok.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
And so the angel says well, you know when you're,
(45:21):
when you're a human being, youknow, you, you have, you're
going to be born as a humanbeing and you're going to be
God's immortal child and you'regoing to go down to Earth and
think of all the other entitiesyou're going to meet on Earth.
This is kind of like theBuddhist, what is it?
Jharka stories, but anyway, soyou can see why.
If you didn't know how to takethese voices from experience and
(45:43):
essence, or know that thecharacters that Blake is
describing are mental states andthat these are psychological
allegories of spiritualdevelopment, you might just
think that this is like therantings of a crazy man, and
(46:03):
especially when everybody or noteverybody, but most of even the
people that took him seriouslyas a poet thought that he didn't
make any sense, it wasn'tcoherent in the big picture.
And it was only 100 years afterhe died that people began to
(46:29):
take him seriously, both hisshort and long poems seriously,
both his short and long poems.
And the reason for that is inthose 100 years, particularly
because the first serious bookof Blake, literary criticism,
came out in around 1924, I think1927, 100 years after his death
(46:52):
.
You needed to have AlbertEinstein's theory of relativity
be taken seriously in terms andin phrasing that are not just a
commonplace speech of everydayman.
That was the kind of poetrythat was popular and emerging in
(47:24):
Blake's time, for this reallycomplicated, visionary kind of
poetry that you only see in theBible or in Book of Revelations
and so in Book of Thel, just togive you an example of this.
So you read it and it startsand it seems kind of like what's
(47:46):
going on here, because it's alot of symbolic language, like a
Dylan, a lot of symboliclanguage like a Dylan early
Dylan album or something youknow.
And but if you hang in there,you know and you have a little
bit of reading, readers,endurance lines will emerge
later that become the lines thatare quoted and in front of
(48:10):
every book you've ever read inthe last hundred years, quoting
Blake, and you wonder where theycame from and you wonder what
the context is, but there'snobody there to tell you because
he's being misread as atheologian, he's being misread
as a romantic poet, which hewasn't, and so all of this stuff
(48:34):
.
It took till the 20s to havehis advocates.
And then, after there was, abook came out by a guy named
Fraser Damon called thePhilosophy and Symbolism of
William Blake.
I think it was 1920s, 24.
And that was the first bookthat took him seriously and that
(48:59):
made him famous.
And ever since that timethere's been more and more books
.
He's become more and morefamous.
And I just heard a Britishhistorian the other day rank the
top writers in the Englishlanguage and it had Blake number
one, shakespeare number two,milton number three, which blew
(49:24):
my mind, because that is amazing, and I think part of that is
that neuroscience is finallycatching up with the madness of
William Blake.
And the reason I say that isthat we have a couple of
accounts of people that knewBlake when he was alive and
(49:45):
talked to them, talked to him.
And one was William Wordsworth,who was the great poet that
wrote the preface to lyricalballads and was the greatest
romantic poet of ever.
I imagine he createdromanticism in England and he
(50:06):
went and saw Blake because hewas wondering do I have any
precursors?
Are there anybody else in theworld that ever thought that
poetry was about the statementsof the visionary imagination
rather than just accounts ofeveryday experience?
And so he went to talk to Blakeand afterwards I asked him what
(50:30):
he said and he said well, thepoor man is as mad as a hatter,
but I would take the genius ofhis madness over the sanity of
Lord Byron or Sir Walter Scott.
So there's a grudgingrecognition that this guy's a
(50:53):
genius.
But they still had to put inthis, you know, undermine him by
calling him a madman, and thatmade it harder for his readers
to take the long work seriously,to take the time to sort of
unpack the symbolism, which isabout as hard as the symbolism
(51:17):
in Dillon.
And if you want to understandBob Dillon's early stuff, you
got to unpack the symbolism.
But if you love the music,you'll do it.
But if somebody told you, yeah,I tried it, it doesn't make any
sense.
He's crazy.
That would sort of underminehis ability to win the nobel
prize, right, but um, but thatdidn't happen.
(51:41):
So getting back to phil, sophil actually.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
So I have a question, because not a question, but a
comment.
You, okay, you pointed out whatwords were said about him, and
it it sounds like whatchesterton said about him too.
So chesterton said critics sayblake's visions were false
because he was mad.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
I say he was mad because his visions were true
well, see, uh, that's acompliment to blake, but you
have to look at hear it.
It through Blake's ears to hearit as a compliment.
Having visions doesn't proveyou're crazy.
A culture that has no use forvisions is crazy, and most
(52:24):
cultures in the history ofhumanity have had visionaries
and prophets and dreams andhallucinations that haven't been
just written off as atomsbumping into atoms, but as
opportunities to exercise theirown imagination, either in
painting or art or even justself-understanding.
Speaker 3 (52:50):
Well, thank you, professor, for this part one of
Blake, and we have a whole lotmore coming in part two.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
Well, we could go forever on this guy.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
As you can see, yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
I mean, he's a world unto himself.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Yeah, blake so far is very exciting and he's quite a
psychedelic madman.
Well, thank you so much and Ilook forward to the next episode
with you.
Okay, travis, thank you,bye-bye.
There's something here for allof you, whether you're a skeptic
or a believer or somewhere inbetween.
With some deconstructionjourney, we're going to be
(53:28):
exploring what this means tohave a life of deep meaning in a
world that feels increasinglyfragmented and dealing with
nihilism.
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy podcast.
Don't forget to subscribe andshare this with anyone who might
find these conversationsmeaningful.
This has been a SubversiveOrthodoxy podcast with Travis
(53:53):
Mullen and Professor Enchastithe world's lies.
Speaker 2 (54:15):
Meanwhile, I'm fine, looking through a stained glass
oceanic scene, say hi to humanbeings with a smile unseen,
grabbing wildflowers as I slidedown hills.
After a rain, after some pain,after the same I'm to blame love
in my veins through syringesuntamed like dosage doesn't
matter.
Inject these veins people gotproblems and the world's got
more makes you wonder what theheck I was put on this earth for
.
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