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William Blake: “The Marriage of Heaven and Hellâ€
THE ideal was Blake's. It will not sound so revolting if we understand what the poet meant by Hell. Hell, he explains, is simply the body, the Energy of Life – hell, because body and life on earth were so considered by the orthodox Christianity. The Christian ideal demands an absolute denial and rejection of life. Fulfilment is elsewhere, in heaven alone. That is, as we know, the ideal of the ascetic. The life of the spirit (in. heaven) is a thing away from and stands against the life of the flesh (on earth). In the face of this discipline, countering it, Blake posited a union, a marriage of the two, considered incompatibles and incommensurables. Enfant terrible that he was, he took an infinite delight in a spirit of contradiction and went on expatiating on the glory of the mésalliance. He declared a new apocalypse and said that Lucifer, the one called Satan, was the real God, the so-called Messiah the fake one: the apparent Milton spoke in praise of God and in dispraise of Satan, but the real, the esoteric Milton glorified Satan, who is the true God and minimised or caricatured the counterfeit or shadow God. Here is Blakean Bible in a nutshell:
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.. . . If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
Such
is to be the ideal, the perfect, the spiritual man. Have we
Page – 125 here the progenitor of the Nietzschean Superman? Both smell almost the same sulphurous atmosphere. But that also seems to lie in the direction to which the whole world is galloping in its evolutionary course. Humanity in its agelong travail has passed through the agony, one might say, of two extreme and opposite experiences, which are epitomised in the classic phrasing of Sri Aurobindo as: (1) the Denial of the Materialist and (2) the Refusal of the Ascetic.¹ Neither, however, the Spirit alone nor the body alone is man's reality; neither only the earth here nor only the heaven there embodies man's destiny. Both have to be claimed, both have to be lived – ubhayameva samrÄt, as the old sage, Yajnavalkya, declared. The earliest dream of humanity is also the last fulfilment. The Vedic Rishis sang of the marriage of heaven and earth – Heaven is my father and this Earth my mother. And Blake and Nietzsche are fiery apostles of that dream and ideal in an age crippled with doubt, falsehood, smallness, crookedness, impotence, colossal ignorance. We welcome voices that speak of this ancient tradition, this occult Knowledge of a high Future. Recently we have come across one aspirant in the line, and being a contemporary, his views and reviews in the matter will be all the more interesting to us.² He is Gustave Thibon, a Frenchman-not a priest or even a religious man in the orthodox sense in any way, but a country farmer, a wholly self-educated laïque. Of late he has attracted a good deal of attention from intellectuals as well as religious people, especially the Catholics, because of his remarkable conceptions which are so often unorthodox and yet so often ringing true with an old-world authenticity. Touching the very core of the malady of our age he says that our modern enlightenment seeks to cancel altogether the higher values and install instead the lower alone as true. Thus, for example, Marx and Freud, its twin arch priests, are brothers. Both declare that it is the lower, the under layer alone that matters: to one "the masses", to the other "the instincts". Their wild imperative roars: "Sweep away this pseudo-higher; let the instincts rule, let the pro-letariat dictate!" But more characteristic, Monsieur Thibon has made another discovery which gives the whole value and
¹ The Life Divine ²
The Times Literary Supplement, January 15, 1949
Page – 126 speciality to his outlook. He says the moderns stress the lower, no doubt; but the old world stressed only the higher and neglected the lower. Therefore the revolt and wrath of the lower, the rage of Revanche in the heart of the dispossessed in the modern world. Enlightenment meant till now the cultivation and embellishment of the Mind, the conscious Mind, the rational and nobler faculties, the height and the depth: and mankind meant the princes and the great ones. In the individual, in the scheme of his culture and education, the senses were neglected, left to go their own way as they pleased; and in the collective field, the toiling masses in the same way lived and moved as best as they could under the economics of laissez-faire. So Monsieur Thibon concludes: "Salvation has never come from below. To look for it from above only is equally vain. No doubt salvation must come from the higher, but on condition that the higher completely adopts and protects the lower." Here is a vision luminous and revealing, full of great import, if we follow the right track, prophetic of man's true destiny. It is through this infiltration of the higher into the lower and the integration of the lower into the higher that mankind will reach the goal of its evolution, both individually and collectively.
But the process, Monsieur Thibon rightly asserts, must
begin with the individual and within the individual. Man must "turn
within, feel alive within himself", re-establish his living
contact with God, the source and origin from which he has cut himself
off. Man must learn to subordinate having to being. Each
individual must be himself, a free and spontaneous expression. Upon
such individual , upon individuals grouped naturally in smaller
collectivities and not upon unformed or ill-formed wholesale masses
can a perfect human society be raised and will be raised. Monsieur
Thibon insists – and very rightly – upon the variety and
diversity of individual and local growths in a unified humanity and
not a dead uniformity of regimented oneness. He declares, as the
reviewer of the London Times succinctly puts it: "Let us
abolish our insensate worship of number. Let us repeal the law of
majorities. Let us work for the unity that draws together instead of
idolizing the multiplicity that disintegrates. Let us understand that
it is not enough for each to have a place; what matters is that each
Page – 127 should be in his right place. For the atomized society let us substitute an organic society, one in which every man will be free to do what he alone is qualified and able to do." So far so good. For it is not far enough. The being or becoming that is demanded in fulfilment of the divine advent in humanity must go to the very roots of life and nature, must seize God in his highest and sovereign status. No prejudice of the past, no notion of our mental habits must seek to impose its law. Thus, for example, in the matter of redeeming the senses by the influx of the higher light, our author seems to consider that the senses will remain more or less as they are, only they will be controlled, guided, used by the higher light. And he seems to think that even the sex relation (even the institution of marriage) may continue to remain, but sublimated, submitted to the laws of the Higher Order. This, according to us, is a dangerous compromise and is simply the imposition of the lower law upon the higher. Our view of the total transformation and divinisation of the Lower is altogether different. The Highest must come down wholly and inhabit in the Lowest, the Lowest must give up altogether its own norms and lift itself into the substance and form too of the Highest.
Viewed in this light, Blake's memorable mantra
attains a deeper and more momentous significance. For it is not
merely Earth-the senses and life and Matter that are to be uplifted
and affianced to Heaven, but all that remains hidden within the
bowels of the Earth, the subterranean regions of man's consciousness,
the slimy viscous undergrowths, the darkest horrors and monstrosities
that man and nature hide in their subconscient and inconscient
dungeons of material existence, all these have to be laid bare to the
solar gaze of Heaven, burnt or transmuted as demanded by the law of
that Supreme Will. That is the Hell that has to be recognised, not
rejected and thrown away, but taken up purified and transubstantiated
into the body of Heaven itself. The hand of the Highest Heaven must
extend and touch the Lowest of the lowest elements, transmute it and
set it in its rightful place of honour. A mortal body reconstituted
into an immemorial fossil, a lump of coal revivified into a flashing
carat of diamond-that shows something of the process underlying the
nuptials of which we are speaking. Page – 128
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