To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an Hour.

                    (Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”)

People think of the Romantic Poets, together with the German Idealists and the American Transcendentalists, as pursuing an “impossible dream.” There’s support for this judgment in the fact that two leading Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge, recanted their youthful views, and others died young and in apparent disarray (see Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”). But I believe that the Romantics’ alleged “dream” comes closer to reality than our normal, ostensibly “waking” life does. For evidence we can turn to William Blake, who lived a passionate life of seventy years (1757-1827) and never reversed his course as Wordsworth and Coleridge did.

The theme of Blake’s later poetry is “mutual forgiveness.” It’s not difficult to see that we must forgive a lot in order to see “Eternity in an Hour.” To see the world in that way we must feel that, in some deep way, “all is well” in the world; and to feel that, we must be able to forgive the evil in the world. For Blake, mutual forgiveness is the most important message of Jesus. The importance of Jesus is not that he “redeems us,” nor that he “rose from the dead,” and will come again. Rather than on what Jesus, as a separate being, does for us, Blake focuses on how Jesus can be in us (“All deities reside in the human breast”: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). When William Wordsworth told Henry Crabb Robinson that he had “no need of a Redeemer,” he implied a similar view: that Jesus is important not as a separate being, but (above all) as one who reveals the divine presence in us.

Blake takes a dim view of the Greeks, in his later poetry, because he associates them with the judgmental pursuit of “virtue,” which he takes to be in conflict with mutual forgiveness. And he takes an equally dim view of Judaism, which he thinks is similarly judgmental. So he’s not advocating “Jerusalem against Athens,” religion (as such) against philosophy. Rather, he’s advocating a brand new religion—of mutual forgiveness.

Blake is probably mistaken in thinking that the doctrine of mutual forgiveness is brand new. Greek “eros” and “cosmos,” and Hebrew “covenant” both seem to point towards what Blake is after, in that both are (implicitly) inclusive and unifying. It’s true that both eros and covenant can also be judgmental and exclusive, but ultimately both must recognize that exclusiveness prevents them from achieving what they (implicitly) aim at, which is inner freedom or self-determination.

How do eros and covenant aim at inner freedom or self-determination? Plato loves the Good because it’s by pursuing the Good that he can be himself, be self-determining, rather than being a creature merely of his circumstances. (See Republic book iv, and my “What is Philosophical Mysticism?”) The Jews—I strongly suspect—love Yahweh (and fear him) for the same reason. Not in order (merely) to become a “separate” people, but in order to become a people that’s guided by what’s good, and thus a people whose identity is its own, in a way that the identity of “idolaters” is not their own. The Jews reject “idols”—accidents of their natural environment—in favor of a single, invisible God because they think of the invisible God as less accidental, and more unambiguously Good, than a mere natural feature, such as an idol, can be. And thus the guidance of the invisible God is, in effect, the guidance of the Good, which is the key to being yourself, rather than being a mere creature of your circumstances. So in both the Greek and the Hebrew case, the guidance of what’s “higher” (the Good, or Yahweh) enables a person to be more herself, more self-determined.

It’s because of this connection between God and inner freedom that St. Augustine says that God is “more inward to me than I am.” It’s not that God is responsible for my actions, but that I’m more fully myself when I seek to be guided by God (the Good).

But the crucial discovery that we make in pursuing this project of inner freedom or self-determination is that a judgmental and exclusive way of following the Good or Yahweh prevents a person from being herself, or self-determined. A judgmental or exclusive way defines a person in terms of what she rejects—what she judges and excludes—rather than in terms of herself. So you can’t achieve self-determination by loving the Good or Yahweh unless, rather than judging and condemning what falls short of these ideals, you nurture every relation to the Good or Yahweh, however rudimentary that relation may be, in yourself and around you. This nurturing entails forgiving, reaching out, giving a second chance to those (including yourself) whose initial efforts at being guided by what’s higher are (even disastrously) unsuccessful.

Thus Blake needs to see that if the judgmental God whom he calls “Urizen” is to be a means to our inner freedom and self-determination—which will surely make more sense of this God than any other conception does—then this “Urizen” himself must embody the forgiving love that Jesus preaches. And indeed Blake does seem to see something like this:

To the Accuser who is

The God of This World

Truly my Satan thou art but a Dunce

And dost not know the Garment from the Man.

Every Harlot was a Virgin once

Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.

Though thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine

Of Jesus & Jehovah: thou art still

The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline

The lost Traveler’s dream under the Hill.

                     (“The Gates of Paradise,” 1826)

“The Accuser who is The God of This World … Satan”: Here, Blake identifies “Satan” with the wrathful God of the Old Testament, because of the way they both differ from Jesus’s God of forgiveness. But in the end (Blake suggests), in spite of the misunderstandings that are associated with names like “Jesus” and “Jehovah,” they’re all one. This “Satan,” “Jesus” or “Jehovah” is still “the lost Traveler’s dream”—what we’re all really seeking—though often under misleadingly “judgmental” and exclusive descriptions. Here, the often pugnacious Blake actually seems ready to extend a hand of forgiveness to the judgmental Urizen, whom he has most bitterly opposed. Which would be the ultimate demonstration of his seriousness in following Jesus’s teaching of forgiveness.

Blake’s vision of unity through mutual forgiveness resembles the vision of the young Wordsworth:

Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love and hope—…

Of joy in widest commonalty spread;

Of the individual mind that keeps its own

Inviolate retirement, and consists

With being limitless, the one great Life;

I sing: fit audience let me find though few.

                    (“Home at Grasmere,” 1800).

When he describes the individual mind’s “inviolate retirement” as consistent with the unity of “the one great Life,” Wordsworth presupposes the same great forgiveness that Blake dreams of. As joy and Life, Wordsworth’s vision is clearly of this world, not of another one. Wordsworth later hedged his bets by appealing to a possible future state, in another world. But William Blake never compromised his vision of heaven on earth (“a Heaven in a Wild Flower, … and Eternity in an Hour”). Nor should we!