The Rebellion of the Lover of the Living God

William Blake, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton: marks of the mystic's way

Jerusalem awakes. Image by William Blake

William Blake was born with suspicion of Catholics commonplace in England. In his early twenties, during June 1780, the Gordon Riots wrecked London in a week of uncontained passions fired by anti-Catholic feeling. Hundreds died. Blake expressed the terrifying energy as “thunder smoke & sullen flame & howlings & fury & blood”.

He could himself indulge the prejudice. One of his pictures features an unspecified Pope with batwings. The pontiff has a book open on his lap, a sign in Blake of the legalism and moralising that he loathed. “Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds | and binding with briars my joys and desires,” he writes in “The Garden of Love”.

Detail from Europe A Prophecy . Image by William Blake

However, as ever with Blake, his views are complex for he also spoke warmly of Roman Catholicism. In contradistinction to the Church of England, he one day retorted that the Church of Rome was “the only one which taught the forgiveness of sins.” Georgian Anglicanism was too tied to maintaining rigid social structures truly to preach that creed.

Further, his appreciation of the Catholic tradition blossomed when it came to certain particular figures. Three stand out as they are named in his work: Saint Teresa of Avila; the quietist leader Madame Jeanne-Marie Guyon; and Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.

These individuals each spoke to central concerns for Blake that, moreover, highlight why I think he is a crucial figure today: exemplifying and celebrating the mystical approach to Christianity.

Take Teresa. “He was fond of the works of St Theresa and often quoted them with other writers on the interior life,” attests the artist, Samuel Palmer, in a letter. The reason for Blake’s love must have been that, in her, he found another intelligent person whose daily encounter with God included the weird and wonderful.

Both are famous for their visions of angels and saints, demons and God. Their reports bear comparison because both exhibit a straightforward, undefended style concerning what, for most, would be exceptional and odd occurrences. Teresa writes: “Though I often have visions of angels, I do not see them.” Blake said: “I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.”

Blake’s biographer, Peter Ackroyd, observes: “The unaffected and graceful tone of [Teresa’s] descriptions is very much like that of Blake.” I think he must have found in her a soulmate.

Teresa’s best known experience, when she was pierced by a dart-wielding cherub, probably inspired some of Blake’s lines, notes the Blake scholar, Susanne Sklar. For example, in his epic poem, Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, Blake writes: “Spain was my heavenly couch, | I slept in his golden hills; the Lamb of God met me there… | With holy raptures of adoration rap’d sublime in the Visions of God.”

That Blake contracts “rapted” to “rap’d”, which might also be a contraction of “raped”, is indicative of his embrace of this type of uncontainable spirituality.

The Transverberation or Ecstasy of Teresa, by an unknown 17^th century artist

Relatedly, both were accused in their lifetimes on account of their second sight: she of consorting with demons, he of being mad. That Teresa’s works became widely celebrated would have been a comfort to Blake. Her influence is, of course, enormous – not least on the second figure I listed: Madame Guyon.

Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon, to give her full name, takes us to another feature of Blake’s mysticism, namely a specific kind of innocence: an unselfconsciousness that overcomes the preoccupations with which people are often afflicted.

A simple but not simplistic attitude is required to see the things of God, Blake might say – this innocence not implying naivety but openness. “Innocence dwells with Wisdom but never with Ignorance,” he asserts.

Blake references Madame Guyon in the poem Jerusalem, placing her alongside one of her followers, the archbishop François Fénelon. To Blake, they are guardians of Beulah – Beulah being a state of mind on the threshold of heavenly eternity in his mythological landscape; they are “the Gentle Souls Who guide the great Wine-press of Love.”

In life, Guyon had discovered the mystical path following an unhappy marriage and the deaths of her children. She was imprisoned, but her fame spread particularly amongst dissenters who had mystical interests, like Blake.

The “quiet” of quietism captures the conviction that the goal of the mystical life is an accord with the divine will that does not need prayers, not least the prayers of the church, which is why the quietists drew suspicion. They seemed to represent a continuity with the heresy of the Free Spirit that had caused multiple disturbances across Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and were also linked to the “alumbrados” or “illuminated” of the sixteenth century – a group with which Teresa was associated because she, too, had adopted techniques of prayer based on silence.

However, properly understood, this kind of mysticism rests on self-surrender – or “self-annihilation”, as Blake puts it: “Annihilate the Selfhood in me: be thou all my life!” he earnestly prays. The silence is a kind of death, a prerequisite to union with God. Mystics like Teresa and Guyon understood this truth, as did my third figure: Dante.

The author of The Divine Comedy highlights another key quality central to mystical Christianity as well, namely love and, in 1824, Blake began to illustrate the great poem.

He worked on the designs until his death, in 1827, and learnt Italian, better to understand the famous Florentine. Dante was clearly in the champion’s league of divinely inspired poets, Blake wrote, alongside Shakespeare and Milton. However, he veered from Dante on specific points.

One was political. Blake was against the monarchy that Dante advocated for social stability. Relatedly, Blake was wary of the veneration Dante displayed for certain martial figures; Blake was too against war, which he called “energy enslav’d”, unequivocally to celebrate poets like Homer.

Most significantly, Blake thought that The Divine Comedy implied a deity who exacted ruthless punishment for sin, eclipsing the primacy of the gospel of forgiveness. (Personally, I think Blake was wrong here and that Dante, like him, was a universalist, believing that all will be saved; the question is not whether but how.)

Blake highlights points of tension by regularly introducing elements in his illustrations that aren’t in Dante’s text. Take the image showing the famous encounter with Francesca da Rimini in the second circle of hell, which depicts her and her lover, Paolo, trapped in a squall of desire. Blake shows the vortexes, as well as Dante’s description of himself in a swoon on his back; the sight of obsessed lovers was too much for Dante who knew all about erotic obsession. But Blake adds a novelty. Above the prone poet is a celestial globe in which two lovers are shown in an ecstatic embrace.

Dante swoons before Francesca da Rimini. Image: Blake’s illustration to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno V

Erotic love is heavenly, too, Blake wants to remind us – fearing Dante’s readers might forget that at this point on the journey. As Blake elsewhere writes: “Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!”

The two may have disagreed in the details but, in fact, the centrality of love on the path back to God unites them. Further, the stress is on sacrificial love in which the lover gives themself to the beloved. One of Blake’s favourite ways of writing about love is with an expression referencing “beams of love”. The phrase conveys both the effulgent light of love and the arms of the cross on which Jesus demonstrated the nature of divine love.

So Blake engaged deeply with Catholic mystics. But what of Catholic writers who have read him? The reception is mixed. Take two converts.

Before his conversion, G.K. Chesterton wrote a short biography of Blake which, though perceptive, fails fully to understand Blake, instead resorting to accusations of obscurity. “The man whose meaning remains mysterious fails, I think, as a mystic,” Chesterton too neatly concludes.

Better are the insights of Thomas Merton who engaged with Blake throughout his life. Merton loved the combination of Blake’s “genius and holiness”. He thought of Blake as “an obvious saint for radical Christians”, meaning those who value tested experience before sanctioned beliefs. He spotted that the spirit of Blake is “the rebellion of the lover of the living God.”

Call that a fearless, faithful rebellion: an assertion of the freedom that the mystic needs to find unmediated intimacy with God. It adds a fourth quality to the mystical Christianity manifest in Blake for which, in my view, he should be much valued today.

Mark Vernon is the author of Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination.

A version of this essay was published in the Catholic weekly magazine, The Tablet.

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