Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #4: Psychedelic Bible Visions and Divine Madness: William Blake (part one)
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.
Having visions doesn't prove you're crazy. A culture that has no use for visions is crazy. Off as atoms bumping into atoms, but as opportunities to exercise their own imagination either in painting or art, or even just self-understanding.
Speaker 3: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 about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we, as humans, withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 2:It's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story packed with drama. Sometimes, when I get bored, I like to fly above the clouds and I ask the Lord what does it take to get down? And every time I ask, he teaches me the same thing.
Speaker 3:Just bleed originality. On this episode, we're going to explore two of the most imaginative and rebellious minds of their time, william Blake and Johann von Goethe. Both were deeply concerned with the rise of Enlightenment rationalism, a movement that emphasized reason, empirical observation and mechanistic explanations of the universe. While these new ways of thinking brought incredible scientific advancements, they also, in Blake and Goethe's eyes, stripped the world of its soul. Both men fought to reclaim the imagination, myth and the transcendent from a world increasingly defined by logic and materialism. But while they sought to reinvigorate spiritual life, their relationship with Christian doctrine was unorthodox, complex and at times subversive. To understand their contributions, we have to set the stage. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the dominance of the new sciences, championed by thinkers like Newton, descartes and Locke. The natural world was now explained in terms of predictable laws, and reason was seen as the highest authority. Even theology was shifting, with deism proposing a distant, uninvolved creator rather than an incarnate, personal God. In England, blake saw the state church as rigid and moralistic, while in Germany, goethe was responding to a Protestant landscape that had become overly intellectualized and systematized. Both sought a return to something deeper, something more alive.
Speaker 3:Blake, born in 1757, was a visionary poet, artist and engraver, who claimed to have mystical experiences from childhood. He saw Enlightenment, rationalism, as a form of enslavement that stifled human creativity and spiritual vision. His works, like Songs of Innocence and Experience and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, presented a radical alternative to the prevailing worldview. For Blake, imagination was divine and Christ was the ultimate symbol of creative liberation. However, his theology was far from orthodox. He rejected original sin, hell and the idea of a punitive God. He saw traditional Christian morality as oppressive and instead proposed a faith centered on creative freedom.
Speaker 3:Playwright, scientist and statesman, his masterpiece, faust, wrestled with the tension between reason and transcendence, ultimately suggesting that salvation comes not from faith alone but from human striving. While fascinated by Jesus, goethe rejected the Trinity, the resurrection and miracles, embracing instead a pantheistic view of God as a force within nature. Though he valued spirituality, his approach was more philosophical than doctrinal. Both Blake and Goethe were intellectual rebels, challenging the dominance of rationalism and fighting to restore the imagination to its rightful place. While they sought to keep the divine alive in the modern world, they often stood outside the traditional Christian orthodoxy. Yet their critiques remain deeply relevant today, reminding us that faith is not just a system of beliefs but an encounter with mystery, beauty and the transformative power of the imagination. With no further ado, I'd like to welcome Professor Larry.
Speaker 1:Thank you, travis, great to be with you.
Speaker 3:How are you doing this week?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great.
Speaker 3:Are you ready to talk about some crazy guys?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, let's talk about Blakey and Madden.
Speaker 3:Under the heading of those first five people, the Soul Under Siege. Can you tell us what were you thinking with Blake? He's very unorthodox and same with Goethe. How did they make it into your book?
Speaker 1:and same with Goethe.
Speaker 1:How did they make it into your book?
Speaker 1:Well, they are two people, two artists and philosophers and major figures in the Western canon, who were Christian in their came out of Christian cultures, thought of themselves as Christian in their worldview, understood themselves, however nitpicking theologians might be as to their orthodoxy, embraced what they considered a Christian worldview in conflict with the new enlightenment energies, and they were trying to sort of see how they fit and what these new deist ideas or Kant's religion within the bounds of reason alone, meant for themselves as artists and as human beings and as people with really existential problems, which they didn't have the word existential, we'll get into that later. But they set the ground for that by trying to find where they fit in. They started elaborating spiritual psychologies, both of them more than theologies and more than theological debates. They were more interested in developing a spiritual psychology and of course psychology didn't exist yet. So a lot of their ideas came from being in dialogue with, let's say, religious spiritual directors and Protestant pastors and Catholic contemplatives and people that were not academic theologians by any means.
Speaker 3:Did you?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:When you say they were almost creating a psychology, do you think that was like they were trying to speak to something that they could feel like they? They sense this need to identify the psyche, or they needed to understand why their psyche was so spiritual, or what do you think was happening there? If psychology if psychology wasn't a word yet really really?
Speaker 1:Yes, I think the latter. I think that they felt that something was being left out of the equation that emphasized measurement and calculation in calculation, and particularly poetry and literature, which were and for Blake, the imagination, artistic imagination, painting and engraving more than syllogisms, spoke to the Christian vision. I think somewhere in Blake and I was looking for it, but I never found it he says that, in order to be a Christian, christians understand Christ through the imagination.
Speaker 3:And so it's an imaginative. What do you think he means by that?
Speaker 1:Well that it's an imaginative act, to, to have faith in, to see in Jesus something more than a failed political leader or somebody with a set of ethical ideas, because the Gospels invite you to a different, imaginative conception of the whole.
Speaker 3:So let me ask I'm trying to grasp this Do you think they're saying living by faith or having faith is actually almost synonymous or very similar to imagination?
Speaker 1:Well, blake, yes, explicitly says that.
Speaker 1:Okay, goethe is a little bit more indirect, but we'll talk about him another time.
Speaker 1:But Blake, one of the great things about Blake, and one of the things that why I put him first and why we're talking about him today, is that he's not one of those people that you can read on your own, and everybody knows that. He's central to the Western canon and becoming more and more central to Western literature as we speak. But when you try to read him or when you you get into some of those long works that Blake wrote and he uses this own jargon of his own invention, he can be kind of confusing and especially with this mixture of heaven and hell and innocence and experience and, as you pointed out, some ideas that just don't make sense to a contemporary person. Like there was a period where he 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 who doesn't believe that the earth is round. That that's made a resurgence lately.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah. There's people who say that now.
Speaker 1:Maybe he'll have a comeback as a literal figure. And then also, though the doctrinal denominational squabbles and academic theological battles don't necessarily know how to enter into, some of these poems that seem written in the voices of angels or stories about his conversations with angels, and these kinds of things are a little hard to get. But I hope today we can just sort of sweep away some of the problems that people have with that, to get at what is still there in him worth paying attention to, and things that Blake says that nobody else has said or that don't make any sense, because he's saying something that doesn't fit into our time and that our time is missing a capacity to understand myth and symbol he doesn't not understand. It isn't his problem that he's not a total literalist in his ability to explain that you can learn more about religious faith going to Sistine Chapel or looking at his illustrations for Dante's Inferno than you can in reading a, you know, a treatise refuting the logic of myth or something.
Speaker 3:Well, it's it's. It is relevant that we're talking about it because those are issues that are currently happening, like the art. The Christian artist world is saying, like how did we lose art? Like it used to be important in the church, and the world knows that the, the secular world, goes to these temples, in these churches, in these cathedrals, like in Spain I went to the. Oh man, I can't remember the name, it's got a crazy name the big, beautiful, beautiful one in Spain, and it's just a work of art completely, and it was to the glory of God, you know, in architecture, and so many were. And then we got into utilitarianism because of the timeframe that Blake is speaking at Exactly. So that's art, but then also mysticism and symbol. We know nothing of that. We are so, whether we like it or not, as Americans we have, even if we believe in prayer, we're so unmystical that we barely pray because we cannot comprehend things that don't actually are not met. You can't record it with metrics or money, like you can't record.
Speaker 3:You can't record how effective a prayer was or an encounter with jesus it becomes a self-help practice, you know yeah, rather than a mystical practice, um so while I don't I don't fully understand what blake is saying, yet I can feel its relevance, as you, as you unpack him and as you know, as I've read the chapter, I could, I could feel the relevance, you know, despite the, you know, unorthodox in his, in his primary theology.
Speaker 1:But or is, or his physics and geography, yeah, his view of the earth. Okay, this is one way of thinking of it. And let's go into his biography a little bit. Blake wanted to be a painter but he dropped out of school at 10 and got apprenticed to an engraver and took a trade which he hoped would help him. You know, get married and have a family. And he married a illiterate woman who couldn't read, and they had one child who died in a miscarriage, a girl. So he never had any children.
Speaker 1:He and his wife lived in a two-room apartment in London with a little garden in the back, pretty much in poverty. And his whole life. In fact, one of the descriptions of one of the critics that came to visit him that had seen one of his artworks at the Royal Academy where he had his works at one time, and he called it squalor I think that might be a little too strong, but he said that Blake was living in squalor and throughout his life he was never accepted. He was considered kind of a crazy guy, a religious fanatic, and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave. They dug him, re-dug him, dug him up and re-buried him in the dissenter's graveyard in.
Speaker 3:London. Is it a specific graveyard for dissenters?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know if they call it dissenters, know if they they call it the centers. They also call it something like um uh, not counterculture, but um uh, contrarians or something. They have a, they have a whole um a cemetery there, uh, and so he's, he's there, and and now he has a nice, uh, big, big burial site with his name and his dates and there's a statue of him in Canterbury Cathedral. Is it Canterbury? What's the one that has all the writers buried? That's Canterbury, right? I'm not sure, because his statue is staring at Dryden, which is kind of a joke, because Dryden is such a rationalist.
Speaker 3:Well no, he's staring him down forever, then yeah, but anyway.
Speaker 1:so why I bring this up is oh is it.
Speaker 3:Westminster Abbey Poet's Corner.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, that's what it is. Oh cool, there's a statue on him, Westminster Abbey.
Speaker 3:If our listeners have a place of pilgrimage.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:If they go to England.
Speaker 1: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 him in the pauper's grave and nobody talked about him.
Speaker 1:And no, let's let's get on with all this good science and shut up the madman Engineering and one of his figures in his mythological works his longer mythological works was a force called Euryzen. Euryzen to mean E reason, and that was that big uh painting that he made. That looks like what a lot of people think god. Looks like the old man with the big white beard, uh bending down to measure with his hand. Oh yeah, the ancient of days painting, ancient of days image.
Speaker 1:And that's your reason yeah and um that was his view of what reason had become had become a kind of handmaiden to engineering and patriarchy, whereas all the real interesting energy in history when he was coming of age, because he was born in the 1750s, was in the American Revolution and in the French Revolution, in which the old authorities were being overthrown by the people, freed from having to listen, you know, get their religion from their priests and getting their politics from the king. The divine right of kings was being, you know, questioned and overthrown. And so he really picked up on that energy and thought that Christ was the ultimate liberator. He was a little skeptical of the French Revolution, whereas a lot of the romantic, like Wordsworth, had a lot of hope that the French Revolution would bring about, you know, spiritual revolution.
Speaker 1:But Blake thought that was unlikely unless there was a marriage of heaven and hell and a synthesis of innocence with experience into a third level, which is the second innocence born of the Gospels. And the second innocence in the Gospels is being born again in Christ, which is what Blake was sort of totally into. But he thought that that rebirth was a rebirth of the human imagination on the far side of the skepticism and Machiavellian rationalism of experience. So that's why he has innocence and experience, because they're the two steps that lead to the Christian revelation in the Gospels. But another way of putting this is that he wrote the Songs of Innocence first. He had no idea he was going to write the Songs of Experience.
Speaker 3:Can you outline what those are Like? I mean, just tell us what they are. I mean Not like you don't have to outline them.
Speaker 1:Well, they're a collection of poems he wrote. His first poems were poeticals, he called them poetic sketches, and they were celebrations of beauty and innocence in nature and in morality and in man man. And he illustrated these poems with his own engravings and then did watercolor on top of the engravings and then published 100 copies or more, or about 100 copies of each of these books and that was sort of his entry into literature and poetry. And apparently at the time making an engraved book of 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 it required a lot of artistic skill, it required a lot of poetic skill, it required a lot of thinking, and so those first books came out and he sold 100 copies.
Speaker 3:Oh, so those are three. Copies are left in the museums in England right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome and the others are collectibles.
Speaker 3:Wow. Art and poetry mixed Self-produced art and poetry. That's really cool.
Speaker 1:And he had collectors back then, you know, guys who admired his engraving but they didn't know that he was going to go quickly out of style the minute he died. But he stayed around a little bit, you know, on the fringes. But let's get into experience, innocence, and we'll look at a few of them, one or two. Here were the first things that he published and then it struck him that they were begging to be complemented by the songs of experience.
Speaker 1:Because, as Blake puts it, in Songs of Innocence and Experience there's two contrary states of the human soul.
Speaker 1:There's man before the fall, or humanity before the fall and humanity after the fall, and the innocent side of man is represented in Songs of Innocence, and then the fallen side of the soul is represented in the Songs of Experience, of experience. And then the synthesis of the transcendence of the two competing sides of the human soul then is revealed in the later books that marry the two, like the marriage of heaven and hell, and the proverbs from hell and works that the everlasting gospel and works that sort of show Blake's own synthesis of those two contrary states. So when you're reading his Proverbs from hell he's not advocating this as that you should have a that these are Proverbs that were left out of the Bible because Satan wrote them. That's not what he's saying. He's saying that there is a wisdom that comes from experience, that is part of the human soul and the human imagination, that needs to be expressed in order to be understood in light of the gospel revelation, and so I don't pretend to understand.
Speaker 1:Oh, go ahead.
Speaker 3:Are you kind of saying that the Proverbs from hell, which I have not read, are kind of like Proverbs written from suffering through difficult experiences and dark nights of the soul and such?
Speaker 1:Yes, or dealing with the fallen world.
Speaker 3:Which is actual wisdom. Like you get wiser as you get older because you've experienced more.
Speaker 1:Well, it's worldly wisdom. Yeah, whether it's divine wisdom is another question, and that's why people have a little bit of trouble with him, because how can he see wisdom in a child, wisdom in an experienced old man and then a divine wisdom that incorporates and transcends both all at the same time? That requires a kind of leap of the imagination and a reach of a different conception of God than maybe people find in Milton, paradise Lost or even in Dante. So the reason I bring those guys up is that he did illustrations for Paradise Lost and he did illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, but the illustrations were designed to reveal his take on the limitations of Melton's view of Paradise Lost. And in fact he wrote a long poem called Melton in which he substitutes his view of Christianity and Christ and the soul in opposition to Milton, yet at the same time says that Milton is the greatest writer in English other than Shakespeare. And he didn't do any illustrations of Shakespeare. I don't know if he did, he might have done some Shakespeare. I don't know if he did, he might have done some Shakespeare.
Speaker 1:But he's more known for his long poem on Milton and his long poem on Dante, in which he subtitles it A Justification of the Ways of God to man, because that point you made when you were talking about how he didn't believe in hell. It was more, that he believed that hell was a creation of the human soul and blamed on Satan. Right, and that are blamed on God, 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 Lost but a philosophical dialogue with Melton, much as it is a poem on Dante.
Speaker 1:Now, I'm not an expert in Blake, it would take years. I'm sure there are people who have spent their lives trying to read Melton and sort of understand his you mean Blake? Yeah, people read Blake's poem. Melton is a critique of Milton's Paradise Lost and that form of sort of Anglican Christianity from his sort of proto-visionary romantic point of view, and so it brings Christianity into a conversation with its literary and mythic past, not its new sciences. Once you start bringing Christianity into a conversation with the new sciences, then everything turns on epistemology. What can you know? You know what is certainty, you know what is empiricism and you know, okay, what is the historic.
Speaker 3:For our listeners. Epistemology is the study of how things are known. How do you know things?
Speaker 1:How do you know things? And we don't have any photographs of Jesus. So how do we know he even existed things? And we don't have any photographs of Jesus. So how do we know he even existed? And can we find the carbon-14 datings of the resurrection or something? And that's all in dialogue with enlightenment. Reason and interesting things have emerged from it, but Blake wasn't interested in that. He was interested in the Christian faith as a critique or as a elaboration of myth and imagination. So let's go into this a little bit with the charge of being mad, because part of the madness is that he didn't believe in a round earth.
Speaker 1:I can understand that. But he was also kind of because he was poor and because he didn't hang with the middle class enlightenment crowd, his faith seemed superstitious. But he was also a visionary who had visions of God, since he was four years old, and so there was oh, sorry, before we go further into the madness and the visions.
Speaker 3:I had a question about with innocence and experience. You know he's saying man before the fall, man after the fall, but in the intro you know we acknowledged he didn't believe in original sin. Does that just mean like he didn't believe in, he believed in the fall, that the fall had affected mankind but he just didn't believe in like some proper way of understanding original sin? Because understanding, understanding that man is falling You're asking a non-Blake expert.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:To say he didn't believe in original sin might be. It's both too weak and too strong a take on him. Too weak and too strong a take on him. He didn't believe that the contemporary explanations of the fall as something that God let happen, or God's role in that or God's relationship to Satan was for him a question about the human imagination and human imaginative capacity. It's sort of like the first time around you got to believe it literally because you're seven years old and you just talk to God through the window in your bedroom. But then, when you're 14, the images change on you and Blake as he matured and as he showed his experiences with living in a London slum where he saw the exploitation of children and the chimney sweeps and being sold by their parents to people to clean their chimneys for five cents an hour, coming out of them with soot.
Speaker 1:Where does this evil come from? These are good Christian slave owners. These are good Christian slave owners and this is something that has to be dealt with, not on a deistic, theological, getting the logic straight so that contemporary Christianity fits with classical metaphysics. This is more about how. What would Jesus have said if he were in my shoes? Or what do I say when I put myself in Jesus's shoes.
Speaker 1:And that requires a little imagination, yes, right, and he becomes a writer and a literature and stories, and so you know, so he writes the poems of innocence and putting himself in the shoes of the innocent, which could be, you could think of it as his. You know, he starts with the Sermon on the Mount and then he moves into the Gospels and Revelation and the other stuff is trying to talk about. You know, from his point of view, how can you have a church, celebrate the poor chimney sweeps of Britain by having Holy Thursday and they invite all the orphans into the church and they put them in a choir and they sing hymns and then, after Holy Thursday, they send them out into the street to beg and to work as a chimney sweep. These were two contradictory states of the human soul. Where did they come from? Right, and for him and for him, there is much a creation of the human imagination as anything else.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's about as relevant as you can get to modern day. I think so he can't justify the church's playing church, while this injustice is just fine with them.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 1:So he has to tell the story of the everlasting gospel, and that's that where he tells the story of Jesus as a child and follows the gospel story through as if he were one of the characters in Innocence and Experience.
Speaker 1:And if you don't know that, if you think that he's got some theology that he's trying to express through these poems, that this is his project 2025 for England or something, that's not it at all, because he didn't even know he was going to write these poems about experience until he wrote the ones about innocence, and he didn't even know he was going to write the Marriage of Heaven and Hell until he wrote the poems of innocence and experience. So he's an artist that's growing into his own vision and it's changing. And then he reads Milton's Paradise Lost and he says this is the greatest writer in England, but he's got things wrong in shaping the human experience than he admits. And so he doesn't know how to make a Christian anything other than a docile believer instead of a creative force in the culture at large, and that creative force has to be somebody who engages the mythology of the age. There's one other example of this and where the long poems came from, because he didn't just read Milton and decide he was going to write a long poem.
Speaker 3:What do you mean by long poem?
Speaker 1:A poem that's over two pages long.
Speaker 3:that's over two pages long. Okay, yeah, the Everlasting Gospel.
Speaker 1:It's like 20, 30 pages long, I think, jerusalem.
Speaker 3:I think is his longest poem. This one was eight pages.
Speaker 1:Eight pages the.
Speaker 3:Everlasting Gospel.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I read it.
Speaker 1: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 it had poems on every page.
Speaker 3:Wow, that's unbelievable. Just as a prolific artist. Even that's unbelievable.
Speaker 1:Well, he's got in Jerusalem. He talks about how he wrote the poem and he said it was entirely dictated to by the Holy Spirit and that he would only work on it in 15, 25 minute periods and it was totally effortless periods, and it was totally effortless and he didn't have to do any revision or much and it's, it was published as it came to him, um, on the wings of the divine, as he understood it, sort of like the way bob dellin describes those early albums that he wrote, yeah, and and when we get to the, when we talk about the 60s because I know we're taking a lot of time on this, but we can edit this down the longer poems grew out of these allegorical poems that he wrote and he invented these characters that would stand for certain mental states, spiritual states. So innocence and experience are mental states, right for him, or states of the soul, two contrary states of the soul. But your reason that God that he drew that looked like what we think of as a man with a beard. Your Reason was a kind of mental, spiritual force, the calculative, engineering, control, your environment, force that plays in the human mind so powerfully. And then he had other forces, like Eutherian, which was the creative side, that was unfolding and creating realities and not just trying to invent and manage experience. And so those all come into conversation with one another and they become ways that he thinks things through, kind of like the images of Narnia or the characters in other forms of fiction, where they all represent different human types and you watch the writer play out their view of how the world works based on these images.
Speaker 1:And probably the best one that I used to use in class was the book of Fell, and I told you that Blake and his wife lost a child in a miscarriage and it always plagued Blake that this happened. Blake also wrote his version of Job, in which he characterizes the comforters in terms of contemporary British people that might try to explain to you why you deserve your suffering. When he lost, he decided he was going to write an allegorical poem about why he lost a child in miscarriage. So he imagines a unborn spirit, the spirit of his unborn child, thel. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:Now you know this is Blake who writes like this. Right, I mean, this is powerful stuff. So Thel doesn't want to be born. The virgins of the virgins, the unborn babies, is trying to tell her. You know, you shouldn't be worried about being born. It's a wonderful place. You know you go down to earth and you know you meet clouds and there are animals and there are people. And the unborn says, well, yes, but there's also death. Or his unborn child fell. He says there's also death and I don't want to be born just to die. And so the angel comes and it's a great little poem. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'm going to read a section from it.
Speaker 3:Okay, ok.
Speaker 1:And so the angel says well, you know when you're, when you're a human being, you know, you, you have, you're going to be born as a human being and you're going to be God's immortal child and you're going to go down to Earth and think of all the other entities you're going to meet on Earth. This is kind of like the Buddhist, what is it? Jharka stories, but anyway, so you can see why. If you didn't know how to take these voices from experience and essence, or know that the characters that Blake is describing are mental states and that these are psychological allegories of spiritual development, you might just think that this is like the rantings of a crazy man, and especially when everybody or not everybody, but most of even the people that took him seriously as a poet thought that he didn't make any sense, it wasn't coherent in the big picture. And it was only 100 years after he died that people began to take him seriously, both his short and long poems seriously, both his short and long poems. And the reason for that is in those 100 years, particularly because the first serious book of Blake, literary criticism, came out in around 1924, I think 1927, 100 years after his death. You needed to have Albert Einstein's theory of relativity be taken seriously in terms and in phrasing that are not just a commonplace speech of everyday man. That was the kind of poetry that was popular and emerging in Blake's time, for this really complicated, visionary kind of poetry that you only see in the Bible or in Book of Revelations and so in Book of Thel, just to give you an example of this. So you read it and it starts and it seems kind of like what's going on here, because it's a lot of symbolic language, like a Dylan, a lot of symbolic language like a Dylan early Dylan album or something you know. 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 that are quoted and in front of every book you've ever read in the last hundred years, quoting Blake, and you wonder where they came from and you wonder what the context is, but there's nobody there to tell you because he's being misread as a theologian, he's being misread as a romantic poet, which he wasn't, and so all of this stuff. It took till the 20s to have his advocates. And then, after there was, a book came out by a guy named Fraser Damon called the Philosophy and Symbolism of William Blake. I think it was 1920s, 24. And that was the first book that took him seriously and that made him famous. And ever since that time there's been more and more books. He's become more and more famous.
Speaker 1:And I just heard a British historian the other day rank the top writers in the English language and it had Blake number one, shakespeare number two, milton number three, which blew my mind, because that is amazing, and I think part of that is that neuroscience is finally catching up with the madness of William Blake. And the reason I say that is that we have a couple of accounts of people that knew Blake when he was alive and talked to them, talked to him. And one was William Wordsworth, who was the great poet that wrote the preface to lyrical ballads and was the greatest romantic poet of ever. I imagine he created romanticism in England and he went and saw Blake because he was wondering do I have any precursors? Are there anybody else in the world that ever thought that poetry was about the statements of the visionary imagination rather than just accounts of everyday experience? And so he went to talk to Blake and afterwards I asked him what he said and he said well, the poor man is as mad as a hatter, but I would take the genius of his madness over the sanity of Lord Byron or Sir Walter Scott. So there's a grudging recognition that this guy's a genius.
Speaker 1:But they still had to put in this, you know, undermine him by calling him a madman, and that made it harder for his readers to take the long work seriously, to take the time to sort of unpack the symbolism, which is about as hard as the symbolism in Dillon. And if you want to understand Bob 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 undermine his ability to win the nobel prize, right, but um, but that didn't happen. So getting back to phil, so phil actually.
Speaker 3:So I have a question, because not a question, but a comment. You, okay, you pointed out what words were said about him, and it it sounds like what chesterton said about him too. So chesterton said critics say blake's visions were false because he was mad.
Speaker 1:I say he was mad because his visions were true well, see, uh, that's a compliment to blake, but you have to look at hear it. It through Blake's ears to hear it as a compliment. Having visions doesn't prove you're crazy. A culture that has no use for visions is crazy, and most cultures in the history of humanity have had visionaries and prophets and dreams and hallucinations that haven't been just written off as atoms bumping into atoms, but as opportunities to exercise their own imagination, either in painting or art or even just self-understanding.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you, professor, for this part one of Blake, and we have a whole lot more coming in part two.
Speaker 1:Well, we could go forever on this guy.
Speaker 3:As you can see, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, he's a world unto himself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, blake so far is very exciting and he's quite a psychedelic madman. Well, thank you so much and I look forward to the next episode with you. Okay, travis, thank you, bye-bye. There's something here for all of you, whether you're a skeptic or a believer or somewhere in between. With some deconstruction journey, we're going to be exploring what this means to have a life of deep meaning in a world that feels increasingly fragmented and dealing with nihilism. We hope you'll join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and share this with anyone who might find these conversations meaningful. This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor Enchasti the world's lies.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, I'm fine, looking through a stained glass oceanic scene, say hi to human beings with a smile unseen, grabbing wildflowers as I slide down hills. After a rain, after some pain, after the same I'm to blame love in my veins through syringes untamed like dosage doesn't matter. Inject these veins people got problems and the world's got more makes you wonder what the heck I was put on this earth for.