In his 2010 novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman recounts the famous dark night of the soul in Gethsemane, during which Jesus concludes: “You’ve gone away, haven’t you, you’ve abandoned us.”
Drawing the distinction between a thoroughly humanist Jesus and his scheming doppelganger, Christ, this is not simply a moment of profound doubt before spiritual illumination, but the moment when the religious game is up. For Pullman, Jesus’ final words on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”, are not a rhetorical flourish but the moment that, dying, he truly understands there is no God.
Pullman, who alternates between labelling himself as atheist and agnostic, abandoned Christianity as a teenager. His loathing towards the Church—Catholicism in particular—is most evident in the famous His Dark Materials trilogy, and would not be so surprising if it were not for the fact that, in 2004, he was elected President of the Blake Society. William Blake is a constant presence throughout Pullman’s works, contributing to the later novelist’s rewriting of Milton as a poet of the devil’s party, and Pullman clearly sees a fellow traveller in the Romantic artist.
Nor is he alone: Christopher Hitchens, author of the virulently anti-religious God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, repeatedly identified with Blake as an opponent of oppression, whether of children, animals or the poor, while also denouncing Blake’s relationship to Christianity as a cancer in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. More subtly, Salman Rushdie, who outed himself as a “hardline atheist” in a 2006 interview with Bill Moyers, riffed extensively on themes from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in The Satanic Verses. So, what explains Blake’s enduring appeal to those with radically different belief systems to his own?
In some cases, as with Hitchens, the relationship between these self-avowed atheists and the writer who wished that “all the Lord’s people were Prophets” is clearly a love-hate one, loving the sinner for his political views but hating the sin of his religious opinions. In other instances, however, the debt of those denouncing God appears to be that, as with Pullman, they see themselves in a line of dissent that leads to Blake.
The appropriation is easiest to appreciate in the context of his influential polemic The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake places himself on the side of the devils and famously observes that “the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Elsewhere in The Marriage, Blake provides an account of the rise of organised religion from the activities of poets, who went around animating “all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses.” From this wholesome activity, priestcraft created a system to enslave the vulgar until, at last, “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”
Such an account would seem to fit neatly with Enlightenment assaults on religion, whether in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion or Constantin Volney’s Ruins of Empires, which Blake avidly devoured. Elsewhere in his unpublished writings, Blake seems to directly refute traditional faith in such a way that would, on the face of it, place him among the most militant atheists of his day, as when in The Everlasting Gospel he writes: “Thou art a Man God is no more / Thy own humanity learn to adore.”
It was pronouncements such as these that led writers such as WB Yeats and the anarchist Herbert Read to consider Blake a precursor to Nietzsche, yet what is most astounding is that these words from The Everlasting Gospel are ostensibly spoken in the name of Jesus. In his final days, he apparently told his friend George Richmond that he died “hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ” and, as the Blake scholar Naomi Billingsley has recently demonstrated, throughout his art he was deeply committed to a Christian vision.
The paradox of this Christian artist who appears repeatedly to denounce God can be explained by his first and last works in illuminated printing, the combination of word and image for which he became famous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In The Ghost of Abel, Satan rises from the grave of Abel to announce himself the “God of Men” and to denounce the compassionate deity as “Thou Human O Jehovah.” This insult, which Satan clearly considers deadly, has a direct line to Blake’s first illuminated book: in All Religions are One, Blake declared that the religions of all nations are derived from “the Poetic Genius,” or human imagination.
Throughout his life, Blake opposed any notion of a God “out there,” which he identified with Deism—the religion of Newton’s Pantokrator who set the universe in motion and then left it to its own devices. For the Prophet of Hell, not only do all deities reside in our breasts, but it is precisely this energetic drive of imagination that is divine. The mistake of Pullman’s Jesus is to assume that God is something external who can abandon us, rather than the divine image of human creation.
Jason Whittaker’s Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake will be published by Reaktion Books
