William Blake's Proverbs of Hell Quiz

Answer:

"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" begins with a prophetic poem and then plunges its narrator into Hell, recording much Hellish wisdom that he discovers. The most famous section of the work are 70 "proverbs of Hell" which, as you might expect, invert much of the knowledge us heavenside creatures take as Gospel (sometimes literally).

"The Marriage" satirizes a certain strain of moralizing, restraining Christianity (in case you couldn't gather that from "brothels are built from bricks of religion") that was the norm in his day and age. Blake never shirked from revolution and radicalism; among the many targets of "The Marriage" are the teachings of Emanuel Swedeborg, author of a treatise called "Heaven and Hell". In general, the refined and strictly reasoned path was not the one Blake favored: "crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius." Blake was also a famous friend of the American revolutionary Thomas Paine, the author of "Common Sense" and a fearless critic of religion.

For these reasons, Blake's work has thus been claimed by atheists, agnostics, and especially by Deists, a theology that asserts an impersonal God. Wrong, wrong, and wrongest of all: Blake wrote, and must be understood, as a devout Christian, albeit a highly unorthodox one. According to Blake scholar Northrop Frye, Blake's belief was that "the worst theological error we can make is the 'Deist' one of putting God at the beginning of the temporal sequence, as a First Cause. Such a view leads logically to an absolute fatalism," where all existence is doomed to no creation and no salvation, just constant entropy from time 0 on.

It is imagination that gives the Energy which countermands entropy, and organized religion - not spirituality - that restrains it. Brothels are built "with bricks of religion", yet the brothel is not a Godless place: "The nakedness of woman is the work of God." The goal of the proverbs, then, was not to tear down Christianity but to build it up: to "marry" it to its contrary.

The "Marriage" begins with the "Voice of the Devil" asserting the following "contraries" to all "sacred codes":

"1. Man has no Body distinct from his soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight."

These lines are a key that will help to unlock the rest of the Proverbs of Hell. The "Marriage" is also where Blake wrote that famous line, later a title of Aldous Huxley's: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." The notion of doors suggests passage in and passage out: when we perceive anything, part of what we see is what our imagination projects onto the world. Blake insists that "the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged" - in other words, things perceived, things imagined, and the physicality of the body are impossible to separate. "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees," and "What is now proved was once only imagined."

And it is "sensual enjoyment," as opposed to meditation or piety, that open or "cleanse" the closed doors of man's experience. Blake feels so sure of this that he intends to beat this into his readers by shocking them: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."

How strange to hear Devils saying so much of God! "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God." "The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God." Indeed, what they are describing is equally recognizable to Christians as either God or Satan. The two sides use the same words to mean different things. "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling." According to Blake, the "restrainer" called reason is made into the Messiah in Milton's "Paradise Lost". "But in the book of Job, Milton's Messiah is called Satan."

There is a necessity, Blake argues, for imaginative thinking and creative leaps and daring and passion and, to use that term again, excess. For the world where everyone is perfectly reasonable isn't a Utopia, it's a frozen, game - theoretical equilibrium, full of cunning and concealed information, where everyone follows all of the rules to a T. A world, as so many of us feel, of straight highways and not enough "crooked roads" of "Genius." A world against courage, creativity, and fun.

Perhaps this loyalty to imagination is why the fool who "would persist in his folly would become wise." For the fool has a kind of intelligence that the learned man has lost touch with - and "Everything possible to be believed is an image of Truth." Energy, acting against entropy, brings things closer to their true selves. "The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow."

To me, this is a clear philosophical argument in the "Marriage", and one that directly precedes Nietzsche by about eighty years. It would be a misread to say that Blake wanted to upturn the Christian hierarchy. The knowledge imparted from Hell is presented the way a naturalist would explain to you the dietary habits of an African wildcat. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," for Energy is delight. But "dip him in the river who loves water" - drown anyone who depends on any thing, to teach the "palace of wisdom" ironically, perhaps. And we have to keep in mind that words are meant by the standards of Hell: "All wholesome food is caught without a net or trap" - "wholesome" because it is expedient; in Hell the easy is better than the good.

These themes of stagnation and closure suggest that imagination is a willingness to be changed. "Expect poison from the standing water" - and, applied to history, you should "Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead." In one section of the "Marriage," the narrator gets to talking with an Angel, and the two agree to show the other what their "eternal lot" shall be (it reads like a Romantic retelling of "It's a Wonderful Life"). Maybe unsurprisingly, the Angel shows this nefarious narrator a terrible fate, where he and the Angel are about to be eaten by a giant, scaly Leviathan. Then something funny happens: the Angel cowers just before the creature swallows the narrator, and the narrator temporarily appears in some symbolic domain. 'I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper who sung to the harp; and his theme was: "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."'

As Blake goes on to explain, the monster is a creation of the Angel's imagination - think back to reading "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" - and since the Angel is "closed" to contemplating death and predation, the narrator falls out of the illusion and has an epiphany. (The Angel's fate, as you must be wondering, is to be chained up in a dungeon studying Aristotle's "Analytics".)

Throughout the text, Blake is insistent that the Hellish exists in the divine along with the Heavenly. (Again, I'm reminded of Nietzsche: specifically his observation that on the gates of Heaven must be written, in mirror to Dante's gates of Hell, "Me too made eternal hate.") He quotes a saying of Jesus: "I came not to send peace, but a sword." The final "Memorable Fancy" again brings up Jesus. Blake lets a Devil win an argument with an Angel by enumerating a list of Commandments violated by him: "Did He not mock at the Sabbath, and so mock the Sabbath's God? murder those who were murdered because of Him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery, steal the labour of others to support Him?" - and so on for all ten. The point, as some have misunderstood, isn't to undermine Jesus but to analyze him in the proper light: "I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules."

The prose portion ends with this twist: the Angel, convinced by this Devil, is reborn as Elijah and becomes the narrator's

"...particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.

I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.

One law for the lion and ox is Oppression."

And by those contrary laws, Blake hopes for marriage.