On the Philosophical and Religious Underpinnings of William Blake’s Cosmogony

An excerpt from, ““As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) So all Religions” On the Philosophical and Religious Underpinnings of William Blake’s Cosmogony” By Arianna Antonielli, University of Florence, Firenze University Press, 2017:

Blake’s religious, philosophical, mythical, and esoteric syncretism is encompassed within a vast system of symbols and themes, from Christianity through the Occultist tradition. This article aims to analyse how this dual philosophical-religious tradition affected the ideas and work of William Blake, and the extent to which it could be said that there was a symbolic transmigration from Christian doctrine and Kabbalistic tradition to Blake’s “system.”

Studies dealing with the influence of different religious creeds on Blake’s vision and works as well as the religious contexts in which he lived and worked, with a specific focus on the Christian religion, are numerous and illuminating, ing, from Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954), and Tannenbaum’s Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies (1982), through Erdman’s Blake and his Bibles (1990) and Thompson’s Witness Against the Beast (1993), until the more recent “Blake and Religion” (Ryan 2006) and William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (Rix 2007). As these volumes contribute to investigating and confirming Christian resonances in Blake’s works, mostly focusing on his biblical allusions, the influence of Kabbalah remains a widely debated subject among Blake scholars. In 1920 Bernhard Fehr admitted that Blake had probably been introduced to Kabbalah by his reading the Kabbalah Denudata (Sulzbach 1677-1684) by Knorr von Rosenroth, which constituted in Blake’s times the first and most comprehensive Latin compendium of Kabbalistic works, available in a language which was not Hebrew or Aramaic. Almost twenty years later, in 1938, Percival admitted that Blake’s background was not properly that of “Christian orthodoxy”. Rather it was, in his own opinion, a religious and philosophical syncretism ranging from Orphic and Pythagorean traditions to Neo-Platonism, from the Hermetic to Kabbalah, Gnosticism and Alchemy, up to Erigena, Paracelsus, Boehme, and Swedenborg. Scholars would later claim that Kabbalistic elements in Blake’s cosmogony were not to be considered a direct influence (Adams 1955), but a possible intermediation through Swedenborg (Percival 1938; Blau 1944). An interpretation that was not so distant from that advanced by Harold Bloom when he openly remarked that “the actual cabalists would have been outraged at the humanistic ‘impieties’ of Blake’s myth” (1935, 935), admitting the possibility of an indirect and filtered influence of (incorrect) Kabbalistic paradigms on Blake. In 1969 Kathreen Raine acknowledged Blake’s readings of Christian cabalists such as Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Fludd (Raine 1969, 13-15), but she added that Blake could nonetheless have learnt Kabbalah by talking with rabbis living in London. “[This] myth, though originating with Jewish mystics, had been adapted by Christian Kabbalists to conform with their – and, in fact, with Blake’s – own brand of Christianity”, that is not the brand of Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, Francesco Giorgi, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa in Sheila Spector’s view (2001, 25). The adaptation to which Spector refers is rather the Christian interpretation of Lurianic kabbalah, that may have been at the base of Blake’s entanglement in Kabbalistic theories, models and symbols.

An excerpt from, “The Theme and Structure of William Blake’s Jerusalem” By Karl Kiralis, ELH, June 1956:

Though Jerusalem is generally considered to be one of the most enigmatic if not chaotic works produced by a major figure in English literature, actually William Blake explains its theme and structure within the work itself. The very nature of the structure, one of interfolded growth as described on plate 98, seems to have caused critics to shy away from a sufficient consideration of the basic form of the work.