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Introduction :
Blake believed in the freedom of man - a freedom that ensured mental and spiritual liberty. He is against all the codes of conventional morality which put curbs on man's instincts and impulses. The orthodox Christian principles instruct the followers to be reserved in both sexual and amorous dealings. The conventional religion is basically a set of prohibitions running: "Thou shalt not. Blake denies both this view and their God whom he calls 'Urizen.' Blake's personal God is Jesus Christ who is the embodiment of love, mercy, pity and peace.
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| William Blake |
Urizen: Traditional and Unloving :
Urizen represents Reason and religion of the traditional kind - a religion of prohibitions. This God, says Blake, is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, whose chief attribute is jealousy. The strange fact about Urizen, whom everyone worships as God, is that he does not really exist elsewhere. He is called Nobody's father. What has happened is that men have found in themselves fear, cruelty, jealousy, intolerance, a love of power and reason which inhibits action. Partly in an endeavour to avoid responsibility for these contemptuous qualities they have invented a God embodying these very attributes. He is man's creation just as surely as if he had been an idol fashioned out of wood or stone.
True God: Blake's Concept :
The true God, says Blake, is the God of Love, whom Christ manifests, and whom we always neglect. Sometimes Blake speaks of Him in traditional Christian terms, but usually he does not think of Him as dwelling apart from man in heaven or as an abstraction in the void; He within each one of us
And all must love the human form,In heathen. Turk, or JewWhere Mercy, Love, and Pity dwellThere God is dwelling too,
In Marriage of Heaven and Hell this is made clearer: "God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or Men." God is not thought of as "all of one place, rather is He ike life, present in living things certainly, but not in a pool or reservoir outside them. What Blake means is that there are divine qualities in everyone; God is the best self of each one of us, and in so far as we live up to the highest that is within us, we become god-like.
God and Imagination :
Blake's term for the God within is Imagination. Alternatively, Imagination is that faculty in man which can hear the prompting of God, intuition or as Blake terms it, " Spiritual sensation." Thus he will some-times speak of Christ as the "Divine Imagination" because it is he who has best understood and most clearly conveyed the message of God. But just as Blake has a symbol for Reason in Urizen, so he has one for Imagination the voice of the imagination in the Prophetic Books is Los, the divine prophet who is called the Bard in Songs of Experience.
The Message of the Bard :
The Bard of the 'Introduction' in Songs of Experience comes to bring men more abundant life. Urizen with his moral prohibitions, has crushed the human personality beneath his iron laws; or to put it in another way. since Urizen is but a human creation, man is bound in mind forged manacles, fetters of his own making, namely, his false ideas of how he ought to behave. He has regarded his Energies (Blake's name tor his natural feelings and emotions, especially those of love) as evil and shameful, therefore he has suppressed them by Reason. But they are not evil; man must recognise that they are the driving forces of life, which are not to be ignored if he is to attain happiness and self-fulfilment. Blake says Energy is Eternal Delight. In the Prophetic Books the symbol of Energy is "Fiery Orc" but the most powerful symbol occurs in the Songs of Experience - The Tiger.
Expression and Repression :
Good and Evil: For Blake expression is good and repression evil. Thus for him sin is not what we understand by the terms but, in his own word, 'hindering' of either one's own or another's 'energies' or natural impulses; Murder is hindering another. Theft is hindering another. Back-biting, undermining, circumventing, and whatever is negative is vice, and Songs of Experience is full of "hinders." There are those who "hinder" themselves - the man who holds back his anger so that it turns to resentment and results in murder, the woman who denies her own feelings of love for the Angel, and who finds too late that he is gone and she is old and alone. There are those who hinder others, who crush the child, and deny him food and warmth. The right to play, the right to think for himself, however imperfectly. In Songs of Experience Urizen is indeed God Conclusion: Blake's concept of God is closely aligned to his mysticism. He conceives of God as the very epitome of characteristics which man is capable of developing. If he nurtures these qualities, man can attain godliness it merely depends on what set of qualities a man develops.