Losing - And Choosing - Your Religion
Why William Blake Rejected and Helen Keller Embraced the Same Theology
Hey there, readers! My 2022 got off to annoying start with some annoying medical issues (gallbladders: don’t get me started). But the upside of being forced to rest is you have plenty of time to read up on esoteric religious philosophies and their influence!
NOTE: For brevity’s sake, I’m going to divide this discussion into two parts, with the second coming in a week or so.
Plenty of us inherit and continue to practice the religion of our parents. But I’m more interested in those who choose a radically different spiritual tradition for themselves. On my father’s side of the family, for instance, a few parted ways with the Baptist church to become Mormon. And my husband knows someone who grew up as a secular (if not atheist) Jew, then became Orthodox as an adult.
What prompted these changes? What causes a person to become disillusioned with one faith (or lack thereof) and turn towards another? The answers are myriad, among them: the rightward or leftward politicization of churches, a preference for more or less orthodoxy/orthopraxy within a faith, a desire for a tighter or more loosely-bound community of believers.
Another compelling reason is how one relates to authority – specifically, authority as embodied in the founding prophets and theologians of a religion. I recently discovered that both William Blake and Helen Keller were followers of Emmanuel Swedenborg, the 18th Century philosopher and Christian mystic. While Blake ultimately rejected Swedenborgianism, Keller not only embraced it but credited it as the sustaining force of her life, even writing a book praising its vision of Christianity.
I decided to take a closer look at why these two figures were drawn to – and, in Blake’s case, at last repelled by – Swedenborg. The answers are rooted in their attitudes towards what divine wisdom is and, most importantly, how we humans receive such wisdom. And in Keller’s case, that attitude was not only shaped but fortified by the particular sensory world she inhabited.
A Super-Crash Course In Swedenborg
Have you heard of Swedenborg? I hadn’t before reading Helen Keller’s autobiography. So I Googled him, hoping the Almighty Internet would regurgitate a nice, pellet-sized summation of his beliefs, small enough for my hamster-sized brain to digest. Instead, I found myself surfing link to link, diving headlong into one of the most esoteric theologies I’ve yet encountered.
Emmanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm in 1688, and spent over the first half of his life as a scholar, scientist and inventor. His first published work, the scientific journal Daedalus Hyperboreus, contained a description of his plans for a flying machine. Beginning in the 1730s, he devoted himself to the study of metalurgy, anatomy and physiology, on several occasions anticipating later major discoveries. For instance, in his Opera Philosophica et Mineralia (1734), Swedenborg theorized that matter consists of particles in constant, swirling motion, with each particle comprised of smaller particles in motion – a fairly prescient grasp of the atom. He also suggested the sun and the planets formed from a common nebula, beating Kant to the punch by twenty years or so.
Well before Swedenborg became a mystic, he was preoccupied with locating bridges between the material and the spiritual, the body and the soul. According to The Swedenborg Foundation, in his work on the human body, Oeconomia Regni Animalis (1740/41):
Swedenborg . . . describes a subtle spiritual fluid that permeates and sustains all living creatures, existing in a complicated interaction with the blood and the cerebrospinal fluid. The origin of life is a sustaining energy that pervades all of creation, and the source of that energy is God.
Then, in 1743 and 44, things got surreal (although I suppose Swedenborg would’ve described things as getting super real). Swedenborg began having strange, vivid dreams (recorded in his Journal of Dreams), which he interpreted as revealing hidden spiritual wisdom – an interesting take, since many of the dreams were graphically erotic, full of erect penises and even a vagina dentata.
Finally, in 1745, his dreams penetrated (Freudian slip?) his waking world. While dining in a private room, Swedenborg sensed the light dimming, then frogs and snakes hopping and slithering into the space. From a corner, a stranger materialized and chastised him for over-eating. Swedenborg fled, but the stranger appeared to him again at home, identifying himself as none other than Christ. To Swedenborg’s astonishment, Christ announced He had chosen Swedenborg to receive and explain the true meaning of the Scriptures to humanity. And to assist him in that task, Christ gave Swedenborg permission to travel freely amongst and communicate directly with the spirit world and all its inhabitants.
After that revelatory vision, Swedenborg abandoned his scientific pursuits and became a Christian mystic and philosopher. He went on to interpret Christian doctrine, as articulated in the Bible, as well as to describe his visits to heaven, hell, and other outposts of the spiritual universe. And he published scads on these subjects before his death in 1772.
Now, you could earn multiple PhDs unpacking Swedenborg’s version of Christianity. I’m certainly unqualified to describe it except in the most general, baby-fied terms. So instead of making a miserable failed attempt at summarizing Swedenborgianism, let me narrow my discussion to what drew William Blake to it – at least initially.
A Radical Faith for a Radical Guy
In his poetry and art, William Blake radically re-imagined society, Christian morality, and the nature of the Divine – so radically, in fact, that plenty of his contemporaries thought him bonkers. In terms of his poetry, he’s perhaps best known for Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Both books turn conventional, Judeo-Christian ideas of “goodness” and “evil” on their head, positing instead that each state co-exists and interacts with the other as a necessary condition to creation and progress. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is particularly subversive on this point, with Blake relating the Proverbs he gathered in Hell, many suggesting that “good” consequences are born from “bad” impulses (case in point is one of his most famous Proverbs: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”)
I don’t pretend to totally get Blake, but I’m in good company: C.S. Lewis admitted to not being convinced he fully understood Blake, even though he wrote The Great Divorce as a direct rebuttal to him! Yet I was interested to learn that, at one point, Swedenborg had quite the influence on Blake’s work. According to the scholar Morton Paley, Blake owned and annotated at least three of Swedenborg’s books (including Heaven and Hell, which as we’ll see, provided Blake with a ready-made satirical title for his own work). And Blake and his wife attended the first General Conference of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church in 1789.
So what drew Blake to Swedenborg? Again, you could earn multiple PhD’s answering this question, but here’s a few reasons I culled from my [admittedly limited] reading:
Direct Visionary Access to Divine Knowledge. Many of Swedenborg’s contemporaries were put off by his claims of chatting face-to-face with Christ, angels, and demons in the supernatural realm. I myself was taken back by Swedenborg’s contention that he visited other planets and communed with extraterrestrial beings (in this, Swedenborg is a precursor to Mormonism’s Joseph Smith).
But for William Blake, the fact that Swedenborg derived his wisdom through visions was perfectly natural and right, as Blake had experienced similar visions himself. At four, for instance, he saw God at his bedroom window, while at nine he saw a tree “spangled” with angels. Whether they were products of the supernatural or of his own extraordinarily creative mind, Blake’s visions continued throughout his life, informing and illuminating his work. What’s more, Blake’s visions were, to him, evidence that the ability to access the Divine, directly and without mediation, inheres in all of us via the imagination. As James Graham writes:
As a child [Blake] never thought he was strange or different; he thought everyone else could see angels and talk with the Virgin Mary. At some stage he must have learned otherwise, but he maintained until his dying day a belief in the universality of imagination. In old age he told an acquaintance: ‘You can see what I see, if you choose. You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done’. He believed that everyone else had the same gift — at least potentially — as himself.
In this, Blake conceives of Divine wisdom as profoundly egalitarian. There’s no need for elaborate rites, beliefs, or gatekeepers to experience God. Rather, the sacred life-force – for Blake, expressed as Poetic Genius – is readily available to all who “choose to see.” No surprise, then, that Blake cottoned to Swedenborgianism, as Swedenborg never advocated for the establishment of a formal, separate church to advance his theology. Rather, as Robert Rix notes, Swedenborg conceived his “New Jerusalem Church” as a community of believers who simply read Swedenborg and experienced his truths personally for themselves. Or, as Rix puts it: “A spiritual enlightenment was now available for those who would open their eyes to his gospel; it was an internal church within.” Indeed, Blake hints at Swedenborg’s idea of the Divine residing in each of us when he writes of a “Jerusalem in every man.”
Connection Between the Spiritual and Natural Worlds. One of the many criticisms Swedenborg directed at the established Church was that it treated the Divine as occupying a remote, spiritual realm. Worse yet, the Church claimed this spiritual realm was beyond our access and understanding, falsely positing that our knowledge is confined to what we experience and perceive in the material realm.
Swedenborg called bullshit on a strict division between the spiritual/Divine and material/natural. Instead, he argued the spiritual and material worlds were distinct yet joined, communicating with one another through “influxes” or “correspondences.” As Swedenborg wrote in Secrets of Heaven:
Nothing can exist anywhere in the material world that does not have a correspondence with the spiritual world . . . Everything in the material world is an effect. The causes of all effects lie in the spiritual world, and the causes of those causes in turn (which are the purposes those causes serve) lie in a still deeper heaven.
It’s a tricky concept, but The Swedenborg Foundation provides a helpful illustration: the sun. Living here in nature, we perceive the sun as that bright, hot ball in the sky. But according to Swedenborg, the sun exists in the spiritual world as the Divine love and wisdom permeating the universe. By that logic:
While it may seem that all things of the natural world are sustained merely by the heat and light of the natural sun, Swedenborg calls this an appearance. In actuality, the sun of the natural world is a manifestation of divine love and wisdom . . . So the sun in our natural world is a reflection of the sun in the spiritual world. By observing the way the heat and light of the sun interact with nature as we experience it through our senses, we can start to understand how love and wisdom work in the world of our inner spirit.
Blake was very much taken with this idea of the spiritual suffusing the material, making the divine knowable, accessible, and – perhaps most importantly for Blake – human. As Charles Gardner notes, in the poem The Divine Image, Blake rescues God from the fog of abstraction and makes Him as visible and familiar as our own reflection:
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
(Now, there’s a good scholarly argument that these lines actually evince Blake’s break with Swedenborgianism, since Swedenborg disclaimed the idea that God was embodied in human virtues. I’d argue instead that the lines show Blake tweaking Swedenborg’s idea of “correspondences” and taking it even further to promote Blake’s conception of the Divine. After all, don’t all great artists steal?)
The Whole Sex Thing. While we’re on the subject of “correspondences” between the spiritual and natural world, I’d be remiss not to mention one joining that was of particular interest to both Swedenborg and Blake: that of the flesh. Swedenborg wrote that “conjugal love in itself is spiritual” and “is only from the Lord.” In fact, in Conjugial Love, Swedenborg describes the angels getting it on in a very randy heaven. He even advised married men of the Swedenborgian church to take concubines, and bachelors to take mistresses. (Again, shades of Joseph Smith. Funny how so many men have divine revelations compelling them to take multiple sexual partners).
Like Swedenborg, Blake railed against the Church’s demonizing of the sexual impulse as sinful; instead, he saw sex as evincing the Divine, writing in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “the whole of creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy . . . This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.”
So it’s understandable Swedenborg’s stance on sex was a big draw for Blake. But to my great surprise – and as I’ll discuss in the second part of this essay – that same stance on sex was also a big draw for Helen Keller.
Abolitionism. Swedenborg believed Africans possessed a purer understanding of God because they didn’t separate Him from the human and natural. Unlike their Christian counterparts, Swedenborg wrote, Africans rejected the “Idea of God as existing in the Midst of a Cloud”, but rather entertained “the Idea of God as of a Man” – or as Blake might put it, the idea that God has a human face.
This idealized concept of Africans was partially responsible for A Plan for a Free Community, created by certain members of the Swedenborgian New Church in the late 1780s. The “Plan” was to establish a free-love community of Africans and Europeans in Sierra Leone, living together free of racial and sexual oppression – and ostensibly experiencing the Divine through lots of sunshine and shagging.
Blake not only embraced Swedenborg’s abolitionism but his vision of Africans as possessing superior spiritual knowledge by virtue of their grounding in and intimacy with nature. As Robert Rix notes, Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy”:
. . . most clearly evinces a Swedenborgian influence. We are told that, compared with the white English boy, the black boy is better prepared for Heaven. This is expressed by the metaphor that he has a greater ability to bear the Sun’s “beams of love” [remember Swedenborg’s belief that the sun “corresponds” to God?] and that he can therefore shade the white English boy “till he can bear/To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.”
The Great Divorce
Eventually Blake became disillusioned with Swedenborg, explicitly critiquing him in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793. He appears to have had several reasons for turning away from the man who once inspired him.
The New Priestcraft. As Morton Paley notes, around 1790 the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church went from being more of a movement of the like-minded to . . . well, to a church, in the more traditional sense of the word. By the time the New Church held its second General Conference, members were proposing and approving a Swedenborgian catechism, book of hymns, and “form and order of worship.” They adopted a strict adherence to the Ten Commandments as well as the belief Swedenborg was divinely inspired.
As you might guess, this was anathema to Blake. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call a “joiner” to begin with; once the New Church introduced formal hierarchies, beliefs, and practices, he must have been appalled. After all, to Blake’s thinking, it was the hierarchies, beliefs, and practices of conventional Christianity that wrongly presupposed God as alien from us, accessible only through “priestcraft.” For that reason, a friend of Blake’s attested, “He did not . . . attend any place of Divine worship.” And why would he? All Blake needed to experience God was his untethered poetic imagination.
Swedenborg Fails to Give the Devil His Due. In True Christian Religion, Swedenborg writes: “from the first Day of my Call to this Office, I never received any Thing Appertaining to the Doctrines of [the New] Church from any Angel, but from the Lord alone, whilst I was reading the Word.” While Swedenborg spoke to angels, it was not to get their advice on doctrine, but rather to learn about their daily lives and how they managed to get into heaven in the first place. The short answer: by following the Word and thereby allowing themselves to become replete with God’s love while they were still earthly humans, particularly by living selflessly.
Swedenborg claims the demons or devils in hell were also once human, but rejected God by choosing unrestrained pleasure, selfishness, and egocentric self-regard instead. This detrimental “self-love”, according to Swedenborg, “By nature . . . runs wild to the extent that its reins are loosened, that is, to the extent that the outward restraints constituted by fears of the law and its penalties, fears of losing reputation, esteem, profit, position, and life are taken away.”
But as Blake saw it, Swedenborg’s privileging of the inhabitants of Heaven over those of Hell was “problematic”, to say the least. As Joseph Viscomi notes, “for Blake, great works of art, not metaphysics, manifest[ed] God.” What’s more, to engage in art – or any great creative act – Blake believed one must liberate and delve into the same pleasure- and ego-oriented impulses that Swedenborg argued would keep us from Heaven. In a Blake-ian universe, in other words, the Divine has its creative origins in the tumult and excesses of Hell. He suggests this very linkage in “Proverbs of Hell”:
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Essentially, then, Blake rejected Swedenborg for rejecting Hell. Blake forcefully proclaims in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” Such “contraries” include the pairing of Good/Heaven (aligned with passive Reason) and Evil/Hell (aligned with active Energy). Swedenborg, however, ignores the necessity of Hell to progress by receiving spiritual wisdom from God alone; as Blake puts it, “He conversed with Angels . . . and conversed not with Devils.” Consequently, Blake can no longer see Swedenborg as an original and visionary who takes Christianity to a new and higher plane. Rather, he’s just a clever hack who simply repackages existing Christian ideas and texts: “Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth . . . [his] writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime – but no further.”
And to really drive his disillusionment home, in typical firebrand fashion, Blake mocks Swedenborg’s notion of a distinct Heaven and Hell in the title of his own work. Let Swedenborg delude himself with his tidy little dichotomies, Blake says; there must be a Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a joining of contraries, for humanity to advance.
The Problem of Authority. In The Marriage of Heaven of Hell Blake delivers some scathing lines attacking Swedenborg as a vain, self-important fraud:
I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the Only Wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books.
A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceiv’d himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg: he shows the folly of churches, and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net. (emphasis mine)
Now, perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but beneath that sarcasm I sense a very competitive ego. Blake was anti-authoritarian to the core – so how could he accept Swedenborg’s authority? Or anyone’s, considering he had his own mystical visions? I picture Blake reading Swedenborg by candlelight, a scrappy imaginary dialogue with the philosopher running through his head. So you’ve seen God, Swedenborg? Big deal: so have I. You’ve seen angels? Same here. You received Divine wisdom straight from the Source? Me too, many times. So let me ask you this: What the hell makes you so special? And why should I believe you?
Blake was too much the Artist and Poet, too much his own defiant Self, to believe Swedenborg unquestioningly. A century later, though, a blind-deaf girl with a very different relationship to authority embraced Swedenborgianism. And her reasons for doing so included mystical out-of-body experiences, the appreciation of herself as a sexual being, and radical politics – all of which would have met with Blake’s wholehearted approval.