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Blake and the sinful arts of forgiveness

2005; Routledge; Volume: 86; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00138380500164141

1744-4217

Paul Miner,

Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1All citations to Blake are taken from Blake, The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake. Standard abbreviations of Blake's works will be used in the citations. 2In the initial passage of Book One of Paradise Lost (6 – 13), Milton refuses to pray to “dame memory and her siren daughters” (the classical Muses of the Iron Age), and Blake's Milton in Milton (14/15:28 – 29) thus laments: “What do I here before the [Last] Judgment? Without my Emanation? / With the daughters of memory, & not the [spiritual] daughters of inspiration [?]” (my emphasis). In Blake's arcane testament Memory creates the fallen moral universe, whereas Imagination frees Man from these encompassing restraints. 3In Jerusalem (12:28 – 35) “Calvary and Golgotha” (interchangeable biblical terms) become a “building of pity and compassion,” where “rafters of forgiveness” and “well contrived words” are formed in reconstructing the Tabernacle of the heavens. Christ was crucified and buried at Golgotha (the place of the skull), and Blake in his context plays on historical prodigy, for above the site of Golgotha ultimately was built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. 4See Blake's comment in The Laocoon, ca 1826 – 27, where “Adamah” (red earth) signifies the creation from the “Female” (E 273), a “Divine Union” of Generation, whereat Adam is formed from Mother Earth, thus “Denying Immediate Communion with God” (E 274). 5See Young. 6In Quarles' Emblemes, 1635, a work which influenced Blake, the Poet, inspired by “swift-wing'd Seraphim,” is instructed to let the starry heaven itself be “thy Apollo,” for True Poets must ascend into the atmospheres of the “thin blew Lanskip” and “flie like Eagles,” since the Poet's “Rhimes / Must mount to heav'n” with a “heav'n blown fire” of hot coals, a fire that seeks “no other Spheare.” Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (pl. 15) speaks of the genius of “Eagle like men, who built palaces [of Art] in the immense [cosmological] cliffs” of Albion, heavens strewn with starry typography. 7Compare the “innumerable company of angels” mentioned in Heb. (12:22, my emphasis). Also note Jerusalem (65:43), where the “sun rose in glowing morn, with arms of mighty hosts.” 8Blake endorsed Lavater's statement that “all abstraction [of the reasoning mind] is temporary folly” (E 599), and Blake added to Lavater's aphorism that those who wish to guide the lunar “ark of God” (Nature as the moony Ark of the Covenant) are in error (E 596). In his annotations to Lavater (E 596), Blake observes that “man is the ark of God the mercy seat is above upon the ark cherubims guard it on either side & in the midst is the holy law,” and Blake adds that “if thou seekest by human policy [i.e. morality] to guide this ark, Remember Uzzah,” who in 2 Sam. (6:6) touched the “ark of God” and died from the result. 9See Blake, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 10Compare Jerusalem (63:16 – 17), where the Living Creatures as “Chariot Wheels filled with Eyes” rage “along the Valley of Cherubim,” in which “Jehovah stood in the Gates of the Victim [the vagina of the Moon], & he appeared / A weeping Infant in the Gates of Birth in the midst of Heaven.” 11In Num. (7:89) Moses is addressed by God in “the voice of one speaking … from off the mercy seat … upon the ark of testimony, from between the two cherubims.” 12For this illustration, see Blake, The Four Zoas by William Blake, pl., p. 250, text pp. 98 – 99. 13In Jeremiah (19:2), “the east gate” to Jerusalem is glossed as “the sun gate.” 14Exod. (31:7) speaks of the “ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat,” and the “furniture of the tabernacle,” and Blake in Jerusalem (12:39 – 42) commands “Lambeth” to “Prepare … the secret furniture of Jerusalems chamber,” for Lambeth (whose popular etymology means the house of the lamb) as a “Bride” is the “Lambs Wife.” Blake notes in Milton (6:15) that “Jerusalems foundations began” at Lambeth, and thus Lambeth in Jerusalem 12 “art one with her [Jerusalem] & knowest not of self[hood] in thy supreme [sexual] joy.” For Blake's counter word-play on this subject see Jerusalem (29/33:35 – 47), where Vala (Matter) unites with Jerusalem (Spirit), in which Vala “was … one with her [Jerusalem] embracing in the Vision of Jesus,” signifying a “Sacrifice of fanatic love … which never yet / Immingled God & Man.” (My emphases.) 15The “Web” spread forth in The Book of Urizen (25:15 – 22), a “Female in embrio [sic]” that becomes a “cold shadow,” emerges from the “soul” or reasoning Brain of Urizen, and this female embryo expands as a moony “Net of Religion,” whose lacteals in turn form an encompassing Womb of Night, a cosmic net of longitude and latitude. 16In further assessing Orion's characteristics, the “rushing fires” of the heavens “overwhelm” Blake's “Soul, / In London's darkness “ (J 5:34 – 36, cf. FR 50, E 288), where in “deadly fear” he sees the constellation Orion's (Los's) “Ax of gold” (analogous to Orion's mighty sword) cut apart the polypus-like fibers, the beaming bloody veins (or married ties of love) created by the mingling light of sun and moon (J 15:21 – 30). 17See Hume, 224. Blake's Ololon as the Moon Virgin denounces “Hume” in Milton (40/46:9 – 13), wondering if “those who contemn Religion [i.e. making it a sin] … [inadvertently] Become in their [deceitful] Femin[in]e portions the causes & promoters / Of these Religions.” 18Blake's Christ in hell “has rent the [chaste] Veil of Mystery,” an act which opens the way to Eternity, and, hence, from the caves of hell in the center of the earth Christ's forgiving “Mercy changd Death into Sleep”—or sexual generation. In Jerusalem (72:21 – 22), “Jesus, breaking thro’ [the] Central Zones of Death & Hell,” viewed as a womb, opens “Eternity in Time & Space, triumphant in Mercy.” In Rev. (1:18) Jesus possesses the “keys of hell and of death,” and after Blake's Christ in the center of the earth rends the vaginal veil, Los and Enitharmon take Christ down from the cross: for at his death on the cross Christ rends the veil, redeeming Humanity. 19The reader of Blake should not miss Blake's interlinear diabolism at line 17 in plate 48 of Jerusalem, where the regenerated will “renew tenfold” in hell, for Blake illustrates a Worm on Fire in the grave of “Earths central joint,” iconography which has to do with the “Unquenchable Fire” and “a never dying Worm” in an earlier plate in Jerusalem (17:45 – 46), allusive to the terrible “worm [that] dieth not, and the fire … not quenchd” in Mark (9:44, 46, 48) and Isa. (66:24). (Milton in Paradise Lost [VI.739] mentions this “undying worm” driven down to hell.) 20When Albion protests in Jerusalem (24:3) that the sun and moon, as “Two bleeding Contraries,” are “his Witnesses against me,” he has in mind Ps. (89:37 – 38), where God's “throne as the sun [will be] before me,” while “the moon” will serve as “a faithful witness in heaven” (cf. Heb. 10:28, et al.) 21Quoted from Swedenborg, “Delights.” 22Blake may have noted that in Exod. (25:10) the “ark” (aron in Hebrew), relating to the veiled Ark of the Covenant, was translated as “coffin” in Gen. (50:26) in the King James' text, the ark wherein Joseph was “embalmed.” 23Macrobius (110), states that the moon “‘ is born’” when it “leaves its conjunction.” Blake's Christ is born from a “Moony Ark” in Milton (42/49:7), for Christ awoke from his sepulcher in three days (Matt. 12:40), the exact amount of time it takes for the “litteral expression” of Christ's face to appear in the smiling crescent of the new moon (M 42/49:14). Christ suffered his Passion (at the rending the veil) on the Day of Venus (Friday), and rested in his sepulcher on the Day of Saturn (the Planet of Abstinence associated with Saturday), and he arose on the third day: Sunday, the Day of Helios. 24Though Pluto and Proserpina/Persephone, allegorical of the sun and moon, are seen in their conventional delineation in John Flaxman's designs to Hesiod, which Blake engraved in 1817, Blake's more imaginative illustration concerning the journey of the sun and moon is seen in Jerusalem 41/46, where Blake's Chariot of History, symbolic of the serpentine movement of the sun through the zodiac, conveys Black Pluto (a conventional classical epithet) and veiled Persephone to hell. To this classical theme Blake added biblical imagery, in which bearded human-faced lions (with flowing hair and a single horn in their skulls) are accompanied by writhing serpents, and these lions pull the Plow/Chariot of History in Jerusalem 41/46, relative to Job's wild “unicorn … in the [zodiacal] furrow” (Job 39:10)—and to Rev. (9:16 – 20), where allegorical locusts in the Bottomless Pit have “the faces of men,” the “hair of women,” the “teeth of lions,” and “tails … like unto serpents.” 25Blake's language also relates to Gen. (6:4), where “giants” of “the earth” and “the sons of God” sinfully cohabited with “the daughters of men.” 26Faber (186 – 87) states the “stone orifice” or doorway configuration framed by a large Druidic “oviform” stone supported by two pillars symbolized “the female principle,” and that this “mystic cell or Cromlech” signified confinement by the “great mother.” The aperture or portals of the more formalized Druidic trilithon with its two uprights and lintel stone connoted similar meaning, according to Faber, and Faber further stated that a single “rude upright stone was the most ancient hieroglyphic of the phallic and solar great father” (III, p. 279). Blake explores such symbolism in Jerusalem, 69, where a Druidic dolman and a phallic monolith are illustrated, and in Jerusalem, 70, through the portals of a Druidic trilithon, potentially symbolizing the Gates of Paradise, a crescent new moon shines down upon enfolding bowel-like clouds. In plate 6 of Milton, Blake illustrates a Druid rocking stone beneath a huge trilithon, and in plate 4 of Milton, generative females weave lunar nervous tissues upon the heavens, while beneath a mourning female sits upon an oviform stone, a Druidic egg-rock that also can be seen in example 6 of a plate on “Druidical Remains” in Archaelogia (1773, Vol. II, p. 360, pl. 23). (Note also the “Rockingstones” engraved by “Basire” in Archaelogia [London, 1789, Vol IX].) 27See Blake, Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion. 28Stukeley. 29Plutarch's famous treatise “Concerning the Face which appears in the Orb of the Moon” (945 C) – with which Blake was familiar—declared that “the sun with his vital force … sowed mind” (semen means seed) or Reasoning in the womb of the moon, an act which in turn “produces new souls,” while “earth … furnishes the body.” Such a concept is addressed in Jerusalem (18:7 – 9), where Blake's moony “Vala [the mother of death] produc'd the Bodies,” while “Jerusalem gave the Souls,” where “Three Immense [celestial] Wheels [appear] turning upon one another / Into Non-Entity,” presumably sun, moon, and earth. Plutarch, in his essay on the face in the orb of the moon (Moralia 945C), speaking of the weaving Destinies, noted that “Atropos” is “enthroned in the sun [and] initiates generation,” while Clotho, who traditionally holds the Spindle, represents the “motion of the moon [which] mingles and binds together” the cord of life; deathly Lachesis, as the third Fate “upon earth,” determines the length of the cord. (See Blake's design to Night Thoughts 197, where “Destiny” (i.e. Atropos) with “her Scissars” cuts the mortal “thread of Life.”) In a watercolor designed for The Grave, two clothed female figures, standing on a new moon and attended by cherubs, hold the unwinding strand of a Spindle—imagery signifying that “all our days are number'd.” For details, see Martin Butlin, 71 – 73. In one symbolical aspect, Blake's Moon Woman is the Virgin Mary, and Blake illustrates the Virgin Mary with a Spindle in illustrations after Milton and Dante. 30In Quarles' Emblemes, the lustful lunar female possesses two “horned [crescent] browes,” and Quarles observes that the lunar “inferiour Orbe” seeks “New fuell” to increase her light from the sun, and with the “growing beauty of her grasping hornes” this radiating moon “fuckes [sucks light] and draws her brother's golden [solar] store / Until [as a full moon] her Orb,” in devouring “ravenous fire, “can “fucke no more.” Quarles Moon of Reason is likened to “the Vulture of insatiate minds” (69 – 71). 31Blake plays on such imagery in The French Revolution (94 – 97), wherein “man lay his faded head down on the [moony] rock / Of eternity,” and Blake also touches on this issue in Night the Fourth of The Four Zoas (59:8 – 10), where Los (who is the Specter of eternal Urthona) lays his “gloomy head / Down on the Rock of Eternity on the darkness of the deep,” the light of solar reasoning placed in the womb of the lunar orb. Later in The Four Zoas (VIIb.93:33 – 35, E 365) fallen Man lays his “faded head [of reasoning] / Upon the oozy rock [of the lunar sphere] inwrapped [sic] with weeds of death,” while watery Tharmas in Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas (129:20) protests that his “weary head is [placed] in the bed of death.” 32In Jerusalem (80:22 – 23), solar Love or “Luvah framed the Knife [the crescent moon] & Luvah gave / The Knife into his daughters hand,” for the sun forges this moony-weapon by casting its molten light into the lunar sphere. Earlier in Jerusalem (27:31 – 33) this uterus-“Knife” of generation becomes the “Druids golden Knife,” a glowing sickle that riots in “Human gore” in the sacrificial “Offerings of Human Life” (where Spirit is reduced to Matter). In Jerusalem (43/29:70 – 76, cf. FZ III.42:9 – 17, E 328) the “Spirits of Pity and Love” (respectively, Vala and Luvah) are subjected to “jealous fears,” wherein “the vast form of Nature like a serpent [the zodiac] playd before them.” 33Blake drolly confided in his Notebook (E 516) that “Grown old in Love from Seven till Seven times Seven / I oft have wishd for Hell for Ease from Heaven,” allusive to Matt. (18:22 – 23), where Jesus declares that one must “forgive the sinner” not only “seven times: but … seventy times seven” if one is to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. 34In the Spiritual universe, Eternity as reinstituted when Male and Female conjoin, a unity which dissolves the Female Form. 35Though Milton's fallen Adam in Paradise Lost (X.890 – 95), contemplating the “mischief” of sexual generation, suggests that the ideal World should be peopled with “Spirits Masculine,” “Men as Angels without Feminine,” in Blake's corporeal universe in The Four Zoas (VIII.104[2nd]:25 – 26, E 377) the satanic Specter is “A male without a female counterpart, a howling fiend / Fo[r]lorn of Eden” (cf. FZ III.43:9, where the female is a “little diminutive portion that darst be a counterpart”). 36Blake in this context plays upon Dan. (3:25), where “four men” (three of them castrated slaves) appear in the “midst of the fire” of a roaring furnace, though they suffer “no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” 37In The Four Zoas (VII.85[1st]:31 – 33 and VIIb.96:1 – 18, E 361) “the Sun [is placed] / Into the temple” in “the image of the human heart,” the sun's Tabernacle in the “Center of the Deep.” 38Blake used the New Testament in his study for Greek, and he may have noted that the word παθoς (pathos) is translated as “inordinate affection,” relating to “fornication,” in Col. (3:5), while this Greek word denotes “vile affection” (i.e. lesbianism) in Romans (1:26), and “lust” in 1 Thessalonians (4:5). 39Bell, I.170. 40Note 1 Pet. (1:12 – 13) in which those who “preached the gospel” must “gird up the loins of your mind.” Blake frequently borrowed from the text of 1 Pet. 41Blake's Christ in Jerusalem 4 points out that “I am a brother and a friend / Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me / Lo! we are One, forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense” in “Beulah, land of shades,” because maternal Beulah is a “Shadow to repose in all the Days of happy Eternity” for those who fall into sexual “Error” (M 31/34:6 – 7). In Rom. (12:17) one is to “Recompense to no man evil for evil,” and Blake's lines in part deal with Chapter 1 of Rom. (verses 26 – 28), where men received “recompense of their error,” since they left “the natural use of the woman, [and] burned in their lust one toward another”—a subversion of Brotherly Love! (Blake quotes a phrase from verse 25 in Chapter 1 of Romans in Milton [30/33:31, E 130]) (My emphases.) 42In Jerusalem (44/30:9 – 10), the divided male and female, subjected to chastity, are “not irritated by insult”—identified by Blake as “insulting benevolences,” an allusion to 1 Cor. (7:1 – 3, 9) in which, “to avoid fornication” (adultery, in context), husband and wife are to render unto each other “due benevolence,” for it is “better to marry than to burn” in the consuming fires of chastity (my emphasis). 43The sun as a “mild beam” in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (8:2 – 5) will “blot” (Blake's word) the fiery “glowing tyger,” along with “the bat, the owl, and the king of night” (Leo Major), imagery that tentatively anticipates “The Tyger” of Experience, where the stars of night throw down their spears as morning comes forth. 44Los's Spiritual Sword in opposing Hand's Natural Sword (J 9:3 – 5) “lays open the hidden heart,” an echo of Heb. (4:12) where the “word of God” as a “sword” discerns the “intents of the [hidden] heart.” Fallen Albion in Jerusalem (34/38:1 – 6) covers his “bosom with petrific hardness” (a priestly Breastplate of Druidic starry stones), lest “any should enter his bosom & embrace / His hidden heart” (cf. the “hidden heart” of Satan in M 9:39 – 40). 46A paraphrase of Mark (2:5 – 7), where Jesus says to those “sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee,” to which “the scribes” ask: “Why doth this man [Jesus] speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only.” 47Compare Milton (14/38:1 – 6) in reference to moony “Ololon” (the Virgin Mary), where at the (sexual) “Rending of the Heavens,” it is asked: “can you pity & forgive?” (my emphasis). In the moon-allegory “Mary” (i.e. Mary Magdalene) in the Pickering Manuscript (E 487), this lunar sphere as the Virgin Mary “remembers no Face like the Human Divine,” the holy face of Christ literally expressed in the Man in the Moon, the “human face divine” mentioned in Paradise Lost (III.44, my emphasis). In Jerusalem (62:14 – 16), the harlot Mary “Magdalen” sees Jesus' “Spiritual Risen Body,” declaring “that in my flesh I shall see God.” Blake addresses this point in “To Tirzah” of Experience, 1794, where Jesus is seen in the flesh of Tirzah as an embryo—though “It is Raised a Spiritual Body,” allusive to 1 Cor. (15:44), where the “natural body … is raised a spiritual body.” Blake's language in addition word-plays on Job (19:26), where Job states that “in my flesh shall I see God,” and Blake quotes these lines in his Illustrations of the Book of Job, plate 1. 45Blake's passage in part relates to the “fear of death” as implemented by the “devil” in Heb. (2:14 – 18). Blake modulates such a theme in The Four Zoas (VIII.106[1st]:7 – 10, p. 379), for a speech originally assigned to the unholy Whore of Babylon, Rahab, Blake subsequently transfers to holy Jerusalem (as the manuscript documents), where Jerusalem demands that Mankind must “build a Sepulcher [for Christ] & worship Death in fear” (my emphasis)—a philosophy proposed by Blake's Satan, and contradictory to Jesus' proclamation in Matt. [10:39]: “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that looseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Thus, there is no Fear of Death. Edward Young, in the final lines of his Preface in Night Thoughts 5, noted that the purpose of his poem concerned “Subduing our Fear of Death,” and later in Night Thoughts 110, Young speaks of the “Cure of the FEAR OF DEATH.” Compare also Night Thoughts 109, where Death as a “KING OF TERRORS is the PRINCE OF PEACE.” Night Thoughts 115, 116, and 129 also mention the “Fear of Death” (Young's emphasis). Compare Jerusalem (27:72 – 80), where Christ is implored to “Subdue my Spectre [the satanic Selfhood] to thy Fear.” 48Swedenborg (The True Christian Religion, note 624) speaks of “The Marriage of Good and Truth” (Swedenborg's emphasis), and in earlier passages of this work (Notes 573 – 4), Swedenborg notes that in order to be “born again,” the “fierce … tiger” must be “transformed by regeneration into a sheep”—or this beast will but remain a “devil among devils in hell.” 49Contrast Blake's word-play in Milton (35/39:4), where “Brotherhood is changed into a [sexual] Curse & a Flattery.” 51In contrast Blake's whore Rahab, a proponent of chastity, “stripd off Luvah's [solar] robes from off the lamb of God,” allusive to Christ's crucifixion in Matthew (27:28), and from the “divine light” of this holy Garment she “made herself a [stellar] Mantle” (E 842). Though in Milton (10/11:16 – 20), “Every thing in Eternity shines by its own Internal light,” such “Internal light” is “Darkened” and “fixd Opake” by the lunar “arrows” of Chastity. 50In Milton (42/49:1 – 4), the Virgin Mary (Ololon as a moony Ark) divides into a “Double Six-fold [zodiacal] Wonder” upon the firmament, analogous to Rev. (12:1), which mentions the lunar female “Wonder in heaven,” whose head is adorned with “a crown of twelve stars.” In contrast, moony Vala as Nature in Jerusalem (63:7 – 9) takes “vengeance Twelve-fold among the [starry] Chaotic Rocks of the Druids / Where the [generated] Human Victims howl” in their vegetative forms that are drawn forth upon the voids. In Blake's picture of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (after Rev. 12:13 – 17), the female sits in a lunar crescent Ark (note that the hand gestures of Blake's Dragon-Sun and Female-Moon reflect each other). This illustration is reproduced in Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pl. 581. In Blake's design, the wings of Blake's pregnant lunar female in double-vision form a heart, and these wings relate to the moon Virgin as described in Rev. (12:14). 52For this illustration in the Temple, see Butlin, pl. 870. 53See Butlin, pl. 871. 54Blake further notes that the “whole employment” of miseries “is to clip the wings and take off the wheels of our chariots,” in part a reflection of creeping time in Night Thoughts 45 and 46, where leisure “takes off our Chariot-wheels,” as we “heavily … drag the Load of Life.” (Compare Exod. [14:24 – 25], which refers to the “host of the Egyptians,” where God “took off their chariot wheels, that they drave … heavily,” glossed as “and made them to go heavily.”) 55Blake, in his annotations to Wordsworth (E 667), comments on the “Vile body … & its Laws of Good & Evil & its Enmities against Mind,” alluding to Rom. (8:9), which speaks of “the carnal mind” and “its enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God.” Compare also Phil. (3:20 – 21), where the “vile body . . . may be fashioned like into his [Christ's] glorious body.” (My emphases.) 56Jacob Boehme, who influenced Blake, in The Signature of All Things speaks of the death of the “selfhood,” dying one in Jesus, where “my self-hood shall become a nothing,” for Jesus' “voice” is “in me and that I am no longer to my self-hood, which I resign to him.” See Boehme, 155 – 6. (Compare Jerusalem [40/45:13]: “In Selfhood we are nothing: but fade away in mornings breath,” at the rising of the sun.) Boehme in the foregoing passage also explains that “therefore God … is become that which I am, and has made me that which he is,” and Blake picks up this phrasing in his final thought in There is No Natural Religion (b, E 3)—which concludes that “Therefore God becomes as we are [the mortal body], that we may be as he is”: eternal Spirit. Annihilation of the Selfhood permits unity with God. 57In Acts (20:10 – 11, 37), Paul “fell” upon Eutychus, “embracing him,” while the elders in turn “fell on Paul's neck” in affection, and Blake emulates these lines in The Four Zoas (IX.133:22 – 33) when, through “Brotherhood & Universal Love, / We fall on one anothers necks [and] more closely we embrace.” 58Blake in this passage “embraced the Spectre … as another Self,” word-play on Book Eight of Paradise Lost (450 – 451) wherein Milton's Eve will become “thy other self,” an object of the “hearts' desire.” 59In Europe (14:17 – 19), Antamon as a winged Christ floats upon the “bosomd air: / With [the] lineaments of gratified desire.” 60Swedenborg in Heaven and Hell (para. 63) further observed that God as a Being is in “the form of heaven,” and this Governing Body of God consists of “members, organs, and viscera” as a whole, and “parts within parts,” reflected as a “series of fibres, nerves, and blood-vessels.” God thus “when he acts … acts as one man” in aggregate (my emphasis). Blake, in his annotations to Reynolds, states that the Painter paints not “Man in General but most minutely in Particular” (E 652), relevant to Swedenborg's The Divine Providence (para. 203), where the “Lord” is expressed only in the “most minute particulars; and that this is the infinite … which the Lord has provided for himself.” In this same work (para. 201), Swedenborg states that the “universal … is formed of singulars” or “particulars,” which are “connected together” like lineaments in a body, and Swedenborg determined that such “minute particulars” are governed “universally” (i.e. by God). In Milton (38/43:19 – 23), “the Divine-Humanity” as Anthropos is the “Only General and Universal Form,” to which “all Lineaments tend & seek with love & sympathy,” and this Universal Form in A Descriptive Catalogue (E 541) is viewed by Blake as “A Spirit and a Vision,” “not … a cloudy vapour or a nothing,” for such airy spirits “are organized and minutely articulated.” 61For Blake's further word-play, see “The Everlasting Gospel” (E 519:21): “He who loves his Enemies betrays his Friends. / This surely is not what Jesus intends.” 62Bentley, 37. 63Insides and Outsides are reflected in the passions of Europe (14:23), where “Between two moments [of Time] Bliss is ripe.” Compare Darwin's The Botanic Garden, in which each “Moment … Feeds … domestic bliss” (Darwin's emphasis; II.ii.191 – 94). 64Note also Ps. (25:6), which mentions the “tender mercies and … loving-kindnesses” of the “LORD” (Jehovah in the Hebrew text). 65In Jerusalem (52, prose, E 201, 2nd para.), Blake speaks of the “Hypocrite” as a “Player,” for Blake was aware that the word hypocrite derived from the Greek, where the “hypocrite” is a thespian “player” on a stage. In A Vision of The Last Judgment (E 563, final paragraph), Blake states “There is not an Error but it has a Man for its Actor” (or Player), a word Blake deletes. (My emphases.) 66Blake in The Marriage (pl. 23) also alludes to Matthew (10:14, et al.), wherein Christ's apostles were “refused” lodging (E 43). 67Bentley, 316.