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Monos o Iesous: The Transfiguration of the Bible in Jerusalem
This essay is
chapter 8 in Mark Trevor Smith, "All Nature is but Art": The
Coincidence of Opposites in English Romantic Literature (Locust Hill
Press, 1993)
The full meaning of the Incarnation is that the Incarnation is a
dual and dialectical process whereby God empties Himself of Himself and
becomes man and man empties himself of his historical particularity and
his individual selfhood and becomes God: 'Therefore God becomes as we
are, that we may be as he is.' . . . Spirit is this eternal movement of
absolute self-negation. <1>
Nestled in the waxing crescent of the moon at the top of
plate 4 of Jerusalem
appears the transliterated Greek inscription, "Monos
o Iesous." Etched in white line against a
black background, the phrase is linked by a star to the letter
"J" in the title "JERUSALEM."
A floating female figure, identified in by David Erdman as Jerusalem herself,<2> points to the words. Commonly translated as
"Jesus only," the phrase holds a position that invites us to
see it as a motto for the entire poem. Thomas Altizer
assigns it even more importance: "the motto which Blake in fact gave
Jerusalem,
'Jesus only,' is the key to  the ultimate meaning of his
vision as a whole." <3>
"Monos o Iesous," in
its simultaneous allusions to two Bible scenes, the woman taken in
adultery and the transfiguration, urges us toward two simultaneous
perspectives on Jesus, his transcendence and his immanence, and, like Jerusalem
itself and Blake's entire oeuvre, urges us to hold these two
apparently mutually exclusive pictures in our mind simultaneously.
Transcendence occurs primarily in the transfiguration, in which Jesus
hovers above man.
Immanence occurs
primarily in the forgiveness of the woman taken in adultery, by which
Jesus fully enters into the world and accepts it in full participation in
everyday life. Transfiguration and forgiveness fit together in a
coincidence of opposites to exemplify and enact the contrary vision of
Blake. Furthermore the two are inseparable because the transcendence of
transfiguration is achieved through the immanence of forgiveness. Indeed,
even though the two biblical incidents emphasize contrary aspects of
divinity, each contains within it both transcendence and immanence. Each
combines acceptance and rejection of the fallen world.
Thus this motto
exemplifies Blake's solution to the problem of oppositions. Standing
first in his most comprehensive completed project, his greatest poem, Jerusalem , "Monos o Iesous" embodies and introduces the simultaneous
transcendence and immanence that is the essence of Blake's vision. In
that coming together of transcendence and immanence all other oppositions
interpenetrate. Jerusalem
becomes the fulfillment of the theory of coincidentia oppositorum put
forth by Nicolas Cusanus. Although there is no evidence that Blake ever
read Cusanus, the similarities in their thought and the ways that Blake's
Jerusalem
fulfills the goals of Of Learned
Ignorance make the juxtaposition worthwhile. <4> Just as Blake
fulfills the Bible by taking it beyond its own limits, so he does with
the coincidentia oppositorum of Cusanus. For Cusanus left the
coincidence of opposites in a mystery: as learned as we might become, we
must always remain ignorant. Alexander Pope maintained that mystery: in An
Essay on Man we must submit and accept that, "Whatever is, is
right." Samuel Taylor Coleridge tried to envisage the simultaneous
existence of divine and human, but, as we have seen in his lines to Berengarius, he never could. Mary Shelley urged a
double vision, with self-abnegation working against rampant egotism, but Frankenstein
reveals mostly the gloomy failure of that struggle. Percy Bysshe Shelley
pierced further into the mystery than any of those, but the triumph of Prometheus
Unbound , which itself is stopped short by the mystery
of imagelessness, receded before the problems of
The Triumph of Life.
In all his work,
William Blake struggled with the vicious circles epitomized in "The
Mental Traveller." In Milton and The
Four Zoas he made heroic efforts to come to terms with the
coincidence of opposites. Only in Jerusalem
did he fully succeed. "Monos o Iesous" is the emblem to that success.
The words "Monos" and "Iesous"
occur together in only two passages in the Greek New Testament. In John
8:9, during the story of the woman taken in adultery, they occur almost
exactly as in the heading on Jerusalem,
allowing for orthographical errors: "Monos
o Iesous." In the account of the
transfiguration in Luke 9:36 the words, "Iesous
Monos," occur. (The transfiguration
accounts in Matthew and Mark do not use the word "monos.") Michael Tolley
<5> credits W.H. Stevenson <6> with noting the two possible
Bible references, but labels both as doubtful. Alicia Ostriker
writes that both references have relevance to Jerusalem.<7> Joseph Wicksteed
suggests that the words might refer to the transfiguration,<8> but
in response Anne Mellor maintains that the occurrence of the exact words
only in John makes that reference the more likely one.<9> Johnson
and Grant<10> simply translate the Greek phrase, "'Jesus
alone' (John 8:9)," thus implicitly preferring only the allusion to
the woman taken in adultery. The two major texts of Blake, Erdman's and
Keynes's, are silent on the subject.
There is no doubt
that Blake was familiar with the Greek New Testament. Although he may be
exaggerating, we need not doubt his essential claim in a letter to James
Blake: "I read Greek as fluently as an Oxford scholar & the Testament is
my chief master."<11> There is also no doubt that he was more
than familiar with both the story of the woman taken in adultery and the
story of the transfiguration. We have not only the general evidence of
his thorough knowledge of the Bible but also the direct evidence of
watercolor illustrations of both episodes.
The allusion to John
8:9 is unmistakable; the words are exact and the meaning is clear: the
forgiveness that Jesus shows toward the woman taken in adultery, the same
forgiveness that blossoms and flows between Joseph and Mary on plate 61
of Jerusalem, is one of the most obvious themes of the epic. For
example, in the introduction on the plate preceding "Monos o Iesous" the
poet declares, "the Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of
Sin."
Less obvious, but
equally unmistakable, is the allusion to Luke 9:36. As I shall show, both
the words and the illustration on plate 4 clearly echo Luke's
transfiguration scene. Furthermore, on plate 96 when Albion
finally awakes from his sleep and sees the Jesus whom he has turned away
from on plate 4, a scene of transfiguration, analogous to that in the
Bible, is completed. Thus a transfiguration scene frames the whole of Jerusalem
and informs its every plate.
At one hundred plates Jerusalem
is Blake's longest illuminated work, and yet underlying its great
philosophical and mythological complexity is a startlingly simple
premise: the entire poem presents from a variety of perspectives the
single act of Ablion's awakening to
consciousness and his concomitant full individuation.<11a>
By reference to the
two Bible stories, and to the transfiguration echoes in Jerusalem,
and to the two watercolor illustrations by Blake on the subjects of the
transfiguration and the woman taken in adultery, I shall show how Blake
combines both stories together into a new relationship between the human
and the divine which is explored and urged throughout the poem.
The story of the
transfiguration as told in the gospel of Luke clearly emphasizes the
replacement of the old law by the new and the majestic transcendence of
the son of God:
he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a
mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was
altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. And, behold, there
talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias: Who appeared in
glory, and spake of his decease which should
accomplish at Jerusalem.
But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when
they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that stood with him.
And it came to pass, as they departed from him, Peter said unto Jesus,
Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles;
one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not knowing what he
said. While he thus spake, there came a cloud,
and overshadowed them: and they feared as they entered into the cloud.
And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son:
hear him. And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone [monos ]. And they kept it close, and told no man in those
days any of those things which they had seen. (Luke 9:28-36) <12>
Terence Hoagwood notes that the both the text and the
illustration on plate 4 are replete with contraries:
The first page of the first chapter of Jerusalem confronts the viewer
with a vision of contraries before he begins to read the text. Right and
left male, upward and downward sequences, and materialism (with its moral
law) and spiritual rebirth are all set in clear contrast, before the poem
even begins. <13>
Both the text and
the illustration on plate 4 are strikingly analogous to the
transfiguration scene in Luke. First, in the text, the poet begins by
declaring that his subject is a "Sleep" and an
"awaking" from that sleep. In Luke the apostles fall asleep
while Jesus prays and do not wake until he is transfigured and engaged in
conversation with the two prophets. Even when the apostles awaken from
their sleep (a sleep, like Albion's throughout Jerusalem , which is evidence of their lack of understanding,
of their turning away from vision), they still do not understand the
situation. Peter wants to build three tabernacles instead of worshiping only
Jesus. The apostles need the direct voice of God to change their way of
thinking; they need to replace the old law of tabernacles with the new
law of Jesus only. They are awakened from sleep, and a voice from above
corrects and inspires them. Similarly, in Jerusalem, the Savior's voice, which is "over" the poet, calls for an awakening:
"Awake! awake O sleeper of the land
of shadows, wake! expand!" The voice then
goes on to correct mistaken impressions: "I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend." The direct voice
of Jesus insists on replacing old concepts with new. Just as the voice of
God in Luke corrects the misunderstanding of the recently awoken apostles
and inspires them to regard the proper vision of Jesus, so the voice of
Jesus in Jerusalem corrects the
sleeping Albion and inspires the poet
toward imaginative Vision. And in both Luke and Jerusalem the voice which speaks
to the few is understood to be speaking also to the many, to all readers
of the text.
Once the closeness
of the analogy has been noted, the differences become crucial. For even
while Blake is imitating the story of the transfiguration, he rewrites it
in his own terms. Blake the poet sees the source of his inspiring
voice--"I see the Saviour over
me"--while the apostles in Luke see only the cloud from which the
voice of God broadcasts. The apostles do not see clearly and do not
understand clearly, not only because they are sleepy but also because God
is coy. In fact the God of the scene in Luke is little improvement over
the Old Testament God who sheltered his face from view; the God who
declares the supremacy of his son Jesus is still the unapproachable
Yahweh of Moses. Not only can Blake see his dictating Saviour,
but the voice itself promises a deeper unity with the poet, total
interpenetration of the human and the divine: "Within your bosoms I
reside, and you reside in me."
In the New Testament
transfiguration story God is the supreme invisibility, distant and
beclouded; the apostles are inferior sleepyheads who worship in the wrong
way, far beneath their God. They must look up to see him and at best they
see a cloud; even after they are corrected, their state of blind sleep
has been raised only to a state of foggy obeisance. Blake re-interprets
the story: in Jerusalem
the Savior is visible and accessible; the poet, as well as all humanity,
needs to wake up and see clearly what is possible beyond ordinary limits.
As Jesus declares later in Jerusalem:
. . . I am the Resurrection & the Life.
I Die & pass the limits of possibility, as it
appears
To individual perception. (62:18-20)
The Vision is thus
made available at the beginning of the poem, but it is not until nearly
the end that Albion does awaken. When he
first has the opportunity on plate 4, he turns away and falls into sleep/death,
as he declares his opposition to Jesus's
vision:
Phantom of the over
heated brain: shadow of immortailty!
Seeking to keep my soul a victim to thy Love!
. . .
By demonstration man alone can live, and not by faith.
. . . here will I build my Laws of Moral Virtue.
(4:24-29)
Hoagwood precisely notices the
reversal that Blake has set up:
[Albion] has assembled the same
principles and contexts that Christ had assembled above, but in reverse
perspective; in this way, the text of plate 4 reproduces the patterns of
contraries and reversal that characterize the preceding
designs.<14>
In effect the whole
of Jerusalem performs a
transfiguration and finally breaks through the cloud of obfuscation in
which Albion is trapped, blind to Vision
as the apostles are blind to the true nature of Jesus. The poem is long
and repetitive because the process meets recalcitrance, especially in the
person of the Spectre.
But the deepest
intricacies and most serious wit of Blake's conception here, important
for the rest of Jerusalem
and for all of Blake's notions of religion and art, lie in his new
treatment of the middle term, Jesus. In Luke the voice of God in a cloud
above speaks to the human apostles far below on the subject of the middle
term, Jesus the mediator. However, Luke's Jesus does nothing active; in
his glory he is a passive emblem of the power of God, merely an extension
of the father. He remains distant, strikingly different from the humanity
in which he supposedly partakes as a combination of man and God. And he
is further separated from humanity in that the apostles do not tell
anyone else about the miracle ("they kept it close"). This
Jesus is to be worshipped in fear and mystery and secrecy, as if he were
identical with the mysterious Jehovah of the Old Testament.
In the text of Jerusalem 4 the voice of Jesus above speaks
to Albion and to the poet on the subject
of divine-human love. In particular Albion
is urged to repair the divisions with brothers, fathers, sons, nurses,
sisters, and daughters--in other words to become fully human again. This
advice is virtually identical to a method which Los will later declare on
plate 91:
He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children
One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & in the
midst
Jesus will appear. (91:18-20)
But Albion must go through the horrors of eighty-seven
more plates before he acts on that advice. Albion
is further urged to repair divisions with his Emanation and with the
Savior himself. Here the middle term which the voice from above explains
is not an emblematic glistering mystery, but the very power of the divine
human unity itself.
In Luke the apostles
are told to conceive of the transcendent power in a new way; in Jerusalem Albion
is told to see his own divine humanity in a new
way. In Luke the figure of Jesus stands as an emblem of the relationship
between man and God: God shines and man fears. Blake places before his
reader an emblem of the divine creativity of human love in the form of
his poem Jerusalem.
Completely visible in its minute particulars, Jerusalem
becomes the mediator, taking the place of Jesus in the analogy between
the transfiguration and Jerusalem.
If we can read Jerusalem
(or, by implication, any work of art which appeals to the spiritual
understanding) with expanded Vision, then we can participate in a
transfiguration on a more intimate level than did Peter, John, and James.
We can see the words and illustrations which are simultaneously fallen
and Visionary; and we can see the Jesus who is both God and man. And that
reading is itself a transfiguration.
It is ultimately a
transfiguration that Blake is creating and displaying in Jerusalem, transfiguring the
Bible, himself, and all of existence, through the power of creativity and
urging us as readers to do likewise. The three terms of humanity,
divinity, and mediator (who combines both) come together in a coincidence
of transcendence and immanence. For the Jesus who hovers over the poet
and the Jesus who is one with the poet are the same; in fact in Jerusalem
the God who gives the word from Sinai and the Jesus who forgives sins are
the same.
The message of the
poet who claims to follow Jesus while he simultaneously usurps his
position is that each individual must awaken from his mistaken
worshiping. The only way to stop worshiping falsely is to recognize the
creativity which is the presence of God in each man. Thus Blake does not
urge us to give up a transcendent deity, but he does insist that the
divine is as much immanent as it is transcendent. The useful distinction
to make is not between transcendence and immanence, just as in plate 10
the useful distinction is not that of good and evil. Those contraries
should both be fully embraced. The useful distinction is the one between
creative individuality, which leads to total human and divine Vision, and
secretive vengeance, which leads to chastity, warfare, and punishment.
Blake transfigures
Jesus into a creative power more intimate than priestly separation and
secrecy allow for. And to be more intimate Jesus must expand his role,
just as he commands Albion and the poet
to do ("awake, expand"). In fact Blake's Jesus, in the form of
Blake's creativity, expands to fill all three roles in the
transfiguration: God, intermediary, and human; thus the basic structure
of the transfiguration scene is maintained even while it is subverted and
denied. "Jesus only" takes on a transfigured meaning. Thus the
transfiguration scene, the Bible, Blake, and perhaps the reader are
transfigured into new Vision. To be the best possible readers of Jerusalem we
must transfigure it by our own powers of creativity, just as it does to
the Bible.
 Like the text on plate 4, the
illustration at the top of plate 4 is strikingly
similar to the transfiguration scene in Luke. At the top of
the plate are the words which must be heard ("Monos
o Iesous"); in the middle is a cloud which
simultaneously obscures and reveals; at the bottom are three figures
whose vision is imperfect. On top of a mountain which contains the
engraved text sit three figures, analogous to the apostles in the Bible
account, who cannot see the words above them. The figure on the left
gazes upward in the right direction, but his vision is obstructed by the
cloud which envelopes the title "JERUSALEM." Even if he could see
through the cloud, the crescent moon would cut off the word "Iesous" from his vision and leave "Monos" only. The figure on the right also gazes
upward, but his line of sight is far off the mark. The middle figure
appears to be restraining both men's attempts to see, and she stares
straight at the reader as if to hypnotize him and becloud his vision.
However, the line of her outstretched right arm (pointing to the reader's
left) leads directly to a chain of three flying children who
circumnavigate the cloud befogging "JERUSALEM." There might thus be a
way indicated: go around. The children are lifted upward by the floating Jerusalem herself,
who points directly to the essential words at the top of the plate,
"Monos o Iesous."
Erdman says that the
scene below the title on plate 4 is a misjudgment scene.<15> Both
Bible references give us scenes of people misjudging and being set
straight by a divine voice. Just as Peter, James, and John mistakenly
want to erect temples to Moses, Elias, and Jesus, so the Albion figures under the sibyl's hands want to
remain under her grasp. But the female figure above, like the female babe
in "The Mental Traveller," has
completely escaped the limits of the scene below. Just as the words of
God in the transfiguration scene proclaim Jesus to be the beloved son and
the Bible text proclaims him to be alone, so the words at the top of the
page inform and correct the mistaken judgement
below them. These words, which echo the descending words of Jesus etched
in the plate below are soon denied by the Spectre
who stands "over" Los (6:4 and illustration on plate 16) and
provides the negative of the words of God and Jesus. But the wings of the
Spectre in the illustration and his words are
designed to hide the true light from the poet. When he looks up on plate
6 all he can see is the Spectre. When the left
figure on plate 4 looks up, he sees the title "JERUSALEM" floating in the clouds,
a few stars, and the word Monos. The word
"Iesous," which Jerusalem can see clearly and to which
she points, is hidden from the figure's view by the moon and the cloud.
 Blake's watercolor
illustration of the transfiguration, painted as part of the Butts series
of Bible illustrations, is built on a structure similar to that of the
illustration on plate 4. Jesus stands glowing in the center, dividing
most of the picture vertically in half. Below his feet crouch Peter,
James, and John, who have accompanied Jesus up the mountain.
The two in the bottom corners gaze up, as do two figures in Jerusalem 4,
at the face of the transfigured Christ, while the third, directly under
the feet of Jesus, hides his face in his sleeve. The two gazing up appear
to have just awoken and the third seems still asleep. The round, almost petaled top of the sleeper's head becomes a pedestal
for the feet of Jesus and provides a contrast with the glowing face of
Jesus at the top of the illustration. The humbled posture of the three
apostles makes them appear to be part of the mountain; in fact, since no
part of the actual mountain is visible, they seem to be the mountain.
Kneeling in symmetrical bows appear Moses on Jesus's
right (our left) and Elijah on his left. Their hands in a position for
prayer, they too gaze up piously at Jesus's
face. Here Blake has altered the Bible account which reports that Moses
and Elijah stood and spoke with Jesus but does not say that they
worshipped him. Thus Blake makes his transfigured Jesus even more lordly, even more transcendent than does Luke.
The lower garments
of Moses, Jesus, and Elijah curl sinuously away from their feet, making
them appear almost to float in the air, and separating them from the
lower apostles. But what is most interesting is Blake's addition of two
bearded patriarchal faces, with large wings, hovering in the background,
one on each side of Jesus's face, at a slightly
lower level. The appearance of these two characters does not simply alter
the biblical text, but also adds a completely new dimension to it. At
first glance, in an orthodox reading of the painting--and the painting
certainly lends itself to being read as straightforward praise of this
exalted Jesus--these two figures are simply two angels of God presiding over
the ceremony. No such angels are mentioned in any of the accounts of the
transfiguration, but they could easily be a pictorial representation of
the invisible God who speaks in the scene. Indeed the picture perhaps
encourages us to read the three faces across the top as somehow forming a
divine trinity, set off from humanity. The three humans in the design,
relegated to the bottom level of the painting where they cringe in
bafflement, form an earthy ground on which the exalted Savior can display
himself. Thus we have three divine faces across the top and three human
ones across the bottom, the middle human, however, being not a face at
all but the top of a head which looks like a vegetated flower. Across the
horizontal center of the picture the two patriarchs bow, their faces
level with the waist of Jesus. At all three horizontal levels Blake may
be mocking the orthodox reading of the transfiguration: on the grounds
that it makes Jesus into a ghostly unapproachable deity with no humanity,
on the grounds that it causes prophets to humble themselves, and on the
grounds that it denigrates men into footstools. However, despite the
possible mockery, the watercolor retains a dignity and a splendor which
cannot be dismissed by simply seeing the picture as ironic. The mockery
may be there, but the majesty certainly is. A similar doubleness
is useful in interpreting Blake's most famous painting: the godly Urizen
bending from the clouds to measure or create the world with his
compasses. Blakeans in the know usually read
that picture ironically, but surely the transcendent majesty of the god
remains, no matter what mockery exists.
The transfiguration
and the woman taken in adultery present opposing views of Jesus. In the
transfiguration, Jesus is separated from man, left alone as the only Son
of God. In the story of the woman taken in adultery, Jesus lowers himself
both physically and spiritually, as he implies that none of us is free of
sin:
And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in
adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him,
Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in
the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus
stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard
them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and
said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And
they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out
one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was
left alone [monos], and the woman standing in
the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the
woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine
accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said,
No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and
sin no more. (John 8:3-11)
The Jesus who
humbles himself into the pains of the world and the Jesus who speaks to
Blake and to Albion and to us all is the
 Jesus of the forgiveness of
the woman taken in adultery. Blake's watercolor of this scene provides a
sharp contrast to the image of Jesus presented in the illustration of the
transfiguration. As with the transfiguration, it is useful to divide the
illustration into three sections, this time from right to left instead of
top to bottom. On the right stands the accused woman, dressed in a
flowing white robe against a dark background. Barefoot, her hands bound
behind her back, she inclines her head to read what Jesus is writing in
the sand with his finger. Her hair falls, but although he is bending more
than she is, his hair does not fall. Also barefoot and wearing a white
robe similar to the woman's, Jesus bends his back into a rounded arch to
reach the ground. The curve of his back is an ironic echo of the arched
doorway which appears behind him at the top of the picture through which seven
accusers shoulder each other in their haste to escape. As with the middle
figure at the bottom of the watercolor of the transfiguration, we do not
see their faces. To emphasize immanence instead of transcendence, whereas
in the illustration to the transfiguration the face of Jesus is the
highest thing in the picture, here it is the lowest of the nine heads in
the picture. It is in fact level with the genitals of the woman, and
pointing straight toward them as if to emphasize the forgiveness of her
particular sin.
Along the bottom of
the illustration are featured from left to right the bare right foot of
Jesus, his hand writing on the ground, and the bare left foot of the
woman. Alternating with these three bare extremities are two dark
sandaled fleeing feet of two of the accusers. Thus, despite the obvious
separations between woman and Jesus, between accusers and two main
figures, the feet and hands on the ground form an alternating pattern of
unity, just as does the lesson of Jesus's
injunction to cast the first stone.
Of course the Jesus
who writes in the sand (we never know what he writes) is an echo of the
Blake who engraves with his pen the words and pictures of Jerusalem . <16> The pointing finger implicitly contrasts
with the pointing fingers of the accusers on plate 93 and echoes the
finger of the female figure on plate 4. In all cases the contrast is made
clear. The pointing fingers of Jesus, Jerusalem, and the engraving tool of
Blake all point in alternative directions to the old law, punishment, and
sleepy failure to see.
The old law called
for the execution of an adulteress (see Lev. 20:10), but the new law of
Jesus does not allow for such easy separation of the sinner and the
righteous. The scribes and the Pharisees see the situation in very clear
terms: the woman is an adulteress and must be punished according to the
law.
As a totality, the self is by definition always a complexio oppositorum, and the
more consciousness insists on its own luminous nature and lays claim to
moral authority, the more the self will appear as something dark and
menacing. <17>
They have been
trying, in the chapter of John preceding this incident, to discredit
Jesus and the belief that he was the Messiah. They fully expect him to
pardon the woman and thereby expose himself to
arrest for breaking the law of Moses. If instead he does condemn her,
then they have trapped him into being just as vindictive as they are. But
Jesus knows how to break the law without really breaking it. <18>
At first he writes on the ground, as if he does not hear the accusers.
Biblical scholars are not much help in trying to guess what Jesus might
have written, but in any case it is clear that his writing is not even
the kind of response the scribes and Pharisees expect.
Then when Jesus
speaks, his answer is even more unexpected: he confronts the accusers
with their own nature as sinners. The self-righteous have projected all
their feelings of guilt and sin on to another person, a kind of scapegoat
(an honored tradition in Mosaic law). Similarly, when we as readers turn
to Blake, he does not speak to us in the ways we might expect; his forms
are asyntactical and idiosyncratic, his
illustrations puzzling and impossible. His morality is not moralistic. He
confronts us with our own accusations, or more exactly he confronts our
selfhoods and forces them to turn tail and run. "Each Man is in his Spectres power / Untill the
arrival of that Hour / When his humanity awake / And cast his Spectre into the Lake" <19> The accusers
in Blake's illustration scatter just like the self- righteous selfhood
scatters when confronted with the identity between itself and a sinner.
Throughout Jerusalem
Blake calls Jesus "the friend of sinners" and forces the reader
to confront his own sinfulness.
Both the
transfiguration and the story of the woman taken in adultery insist that
we see existence in a new way: transcendent in the first story, immanent
in the second. "Monos o Iesous," in making these two opposites coincide,
insists that we confront Blake's Christian art.
The essence of
Christianity, and therefore of the Bible from a Christian point of view,
is also its most fundamental paradox: the coincidence of divine and human
in Jesus Christ. As we have seen in Cusanus and Coleridge, that
coincidence is also central to their conceptions of existence. All the
rest hangs from that basic belief. The essence of the Bible, from the
Creation through Yahweh's covenant with Israel,
from the birth of Jesus through the letters of Paul, from Eden through the
new Jerusalem, is the intersection of the divine and the human, the
temporal and the eternal. The essence of Blake is the imaginative Vision
which sees the eternal and the temporal whole, without sacrificing either
one: Eternity in a moment, Infinity in a flower.
In a Christian
reading of the Bible, the coming of Jesus in the New Testament is the
fulfillment of the relationship between man and God in the Old Testament.
At the same time the new law destroys and removes the old. From that
perspective an analogy with the two parts of the Bible itself can be
helpful in understanding the use of the Bible in Jerusalem:
Jerusalem
stands in relation to the Bible as the New Testament stands to the Old.
To most Christians, following the teachings of Paul, the New Testament
removes the burden of the old law; it destroys the law, replaces it. At
the same time, most of those same Christians, following the teachings of
the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, see the New Testament as the fulfillment
of the Old. Just as Jesus comes both to fulfill the law as the promised
Messiah and to overturn it as the Son of God with a whole new plan of
salvation, so Blake comes both to fulfill the Bible and to overturn it.
As Margaret Bottrall succinctly puts the case:
"Blake called himself a christian; his
commentators point out that he was a heretic; both are speaking the
truth." <20> Altizer gives this
paradox its ultimate formulation; he calls Blake "the first
Christian atheist. <21>
The New Testament breaks
the limits of the Old Testament by extending them to their logical
conclusions, by changing their terms, and by analogizing them into
something higher, all the while respecting them as the foundation and the
necessary prologue to Christianity. Blake uses several variations of
these techniques: he extends the limits of the Bible when he rewrites the
story of Joseph and Mary; he redefines Jerusalem, Canaan, Reuben, and a
whole host of biblical places and persons; and he transfigures the nature
of Jesus; all the while honoring the Bible as the ultimate model of the
kind of art he is undertaking. Just as the New Testament includes the
Old, so Blake's Jerusalem
includes the Bible. <22>
From the Christian
point of view, the Old Testament anticipates the New in that its history
leads up to the New, in that its typology is a shadow of the New, and in
that its morality is a dimmer version of that of the New. <23> From
Blake's point of view, the Bible anticipates the artist/Christian in that
it contains the entire context of time and space in which the artist
lives and works, in that its language is often allegorical of spiritual
situations, and in that its morality must be transcended.
In short, Blake
imitates the Bible by treating it in the same way that the New Testament
treats the Old: fulfilling and reversing. The paradox is unmistakable: to
fulfill is to reverse; to reverse is to fulfill.
Thus in the New
Testament stories of the transfiguration and the woman taken in adultery,
and in Blake's watercolor paintings of the two scenes, we receive two
very different pictures of Jesus. In the transfiguration he is
transcendent, unapproachable, and (as exaggerated in Blake's
illustration), susceptible only to worship and the humiliated adoration
of humanity. In the woman taken in adultery he is forgiving, proud to the
self-righteous, humble to the sinner, and the
writer who sets men and women free from the tyranny of their spectre- accusers. It is appropriate that Blake
should introduce the title page of Jerusalem
with a motto that recalls both these incidents, and indeed turns them
into one, or makes it impossible for us to separate them from each other.
One Jesus comes to uphold transcendence, to inherit his place from the
Old Testament God. The other comes to overturn the rigidities of the law,
to become fully human. The Jesus of the New Testament does both; so does
the Jesus of Blake; and so does Blake himself in his rewriting of the
Bible. Like Jesus, he cannot be fully understood if either aspect is
denied: he both carries on the tradition of the Bible and overturns it.
As on plate 99 the two principles embrace--the God who disperses law (in
this case the new law of Jesus) and the human (the sexually sinning
female). And so the transcendent unapproachable God and the indwelling
human Jesus are one.
Much of Blake's
teaching works the same way as the teaching of Jesus with the accusers of
the woman taken in adultery. Certainly the Bible story can be read as a
simple moral lesson: don't judge others. But the accusers (and of course
the woman herself) experience something quite different from a platitude.
They can not take refuge in the complacent generalizations that readers
can sometimes sink into. Instead of being told the lesson that we can
infer from the story, that no one is free of sin, they are confronted
directly with that knowledge and with the eyes of Jesus and the woman.
And the moment of knowledge and recognition conflicts with the action
that the accusers are in the middle of taking. Stones mentally poised above
their heads, they hear the words of Jesus (and presumably read the ones
he writes on the ground, ironically lost to us in the written
transmission of the gospel): accusation of other and accusation of self
clash within them. Trying to trap Jesus in the paradoxes of the Law, they
find themselves trapped in the paradoxes of a larger, more inclusive law,
the law of the coincidentia oppositorum, the law of the illogical unity
of mutually exclusive forces, the coming together of the centrifugal
transfiguration, thrusting God out from man, and the centripetal
forgiveness of the woman taken in adultery, joining God with man. Unable
to respond physically, unable to respond logically, unable to respond
spiritually, they run away. Similarly, Blake's text again and again
forces us to see the opposing factions within ourselves, because they are
displayed so vigorously in his poetry. Most readers therefore run away,
either by refusing to read him at all or by pigeon-holing his message
into a platitude.
The reader of Blake
who does not run away can not contemplate the text in comfortable, smug,
self-righteous tranquility, as he might Alexander Pope or even the Bible.
Instead he has to confront the Eternity of Blake's minute particulars
with every sweep of the eyes across the words. Blake's simultaneous
imitation and rejection of all experience, and
of the Bible in particular, teach us a new way to read and a new way to
live, a way that demands awareness of how our ordinary understanding
distorts everything from religion to sex, from sight to philosophy.
Whichever side of a
question a reader is on, for example in the matter of sexuality and the
body (horrible trap or imaginative release) or unity and individuality
(one body in Albion or unique individuals) or the nature of the Bible
(priestly restrictions or poetic freedom), Blake seems to agree with it
in one place and disagree with it in another. That kind of dialectical
tension, which exists throughout Jerusalem,
is most epigrammatically embodied particularly in the phrase "Monos o Iesous." If we
as readers can enter the paradoxes instead of fleeing them, we can find a
way to transfigure the self- righteous, logical, sophisticated stones we
want to throw, just as the resurrection of Jesus transforms the stony
tomb.
As Jasper Hopkins
explains the logic of Nicolas Cusanus: God's being is uniquely beyond all
actual and conceptual differentiation, so that it cannot be truly and nonmetaphorically characterized by any predicate
whose meaning is drawn from human experience. <24>
Like Cusanus, Blake
leaps above ordinary human experience; that leap is embodied in the
transfiguration. At the same time Blake plunges deeply into human
experience: to deny the existence of adultery is to be non-human. By a
leap of imagination, not only adultery but the whole law of Moses, and
the whole law of Non- Contradiction, can be re-imagined. Thus a gesture
that is completely strange to human experience--Jesus's
answer to the scribes and Pharisees--turns out to embody the depths of
human experience, where the human encounters and coincides with the
divine. Pope's "To err is human, to forgive divine' receives its
ultimate formulation when Blake combines the transfiguration and the
story of the woman taken in adultery.
In describing the
dialectical method of Mesiter Eckhart, Huston Smith gives us a close analogy to
Blake's method:
in his preaching and writing, Eckhart
keeps us perpetually swinging from one pole to the other; he will not let
us rest in either. To rest in one and forget the other is to lose hold of
the truth, which is essentially paradoxical. God is everything, yet
nothing; distinct from creation, yet indistinct from it. . . . Having
made a statement, Eckhart will often go on to
deny it; but the truth lies neither in the affirmation nor in the denial,
but in the tug-of-war between the two. <25>
Smith explains well
the dynamic disequilibrium of such a dialectical method; add to that
formula an absolute unity of total comprehension, just as sure as that of
Alexander Pope, and you have Blake. According to Smith, the purpose of
paradox in Eckhart and in Zen is to "bring
the normal human intellect to the awareness of its own limitations, and
thus open it up to the possibility of a higher kind of knowing."
<26> While absolutely true of the learned ignorance of Cusanus and
of Pope, this statement gives us only half of Blake. For in Cusanus and
Pope we are to mistrust our own abilities, our own capacities for larger
vision: we can never attain it, but can only acknowledge its existence.
In Blake we fully participate in that higher Vision, as he takes the
traditional formulae of the mystics as far as they can go:
What is Eckhart's concept of Christ? It
is of one in whom God and Man are made one. What is his concept of Man?
It is of a being capable of becoming one with God. Eckhart
is really only developing the ancient formula of Irenaeus
and Athanasius: God became Man so that Man
might become God. <27>
In the
transfiguration, Jesus reveals that his physical body can become God and
that therefore the spiritual God must have already become a physical
body. In the story of the woman taken in adultery, Jesus reveals that the
physical woman can not be separated from man nor
from God. Any work of art is a disaster, a sin resulting from the fall,
just like the sin of the woman taken in adultery. But at the same time
Blake's art insists that this continuous falling away is, as in
Christianity the bases of forgiveness and therefore of resurrection and
of transfiguration.
Jesus's confrontation with the scribes
and Pharisees over the guilt and punishment of the woman taken in
adultery reverses and collapses ordinary modes of being. The simultaneous
contradictory meanings enact the resurrection paradox, which is contained
in the motto "Monos o Iesous."
The combination of forgiveness, which confronts and accepts sin, and
transfiguration, which lifts God/Jesus in His most transcendent form
above humanity, brings along with it not a loss of humanity, but a
sacrificing of divinity--which the ultimate coincidences of opposites
contained in Christianity express in the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.
The dialectic of contradictions in words helps us get there, noy only by encouraging us to seek beyond words,
which is the vision of Shelley and of Cusanus, but by embodying in words
the very coincidenctia oppositorum that is the
basis of existence. The final vision is not bound by time or space;
therefore langugage is inadequate to interpret
it and can only enact it.
Albion's vision of
Jesus is a fulfillment of the transfiguration scene which was thwarted on
plate 4, where Albion refused to hear
and see Jesus. Albion refused to see the
combination of immanence and transcendence that the poet embraces.
As Jesus does in
Luke with Moses and Elijah, so there Jesus and Albion
converse "as Man with Man" (96:6). While Albion
is asking questions about the nature of self-sacrifice, the two are
covered by a cloud: :"the Covering Cherub
coming on in darkness / Overshadowd them:"
(96:17-18). The Covering Cherub is the equivalent here of the cloud which
overshadows the transfiguration scene in Luke. And just as that cloud
removes Jesus from the apostles, so here it removes Jesus, in the form of
Los, from Albion: "the Cloud
over-shadowing divided them asunder" (96:29). But unlike the apostles
(Luke 9:34), who misunderstand the situation and fear for themselves :
Albion stood in terror: not for
himself but for his Friend
Divine, & Self was lost in the contemplation of faith
And wonder at the Divine Mercy. (96:30-32)
Albion has experienced the
transfiguration, has awoken, realizes what he has been doing, and knows
what now must be done.
Do I sleep amidst danger to Friends! O my Cities & Counties
Do you sleep! rouze
up. rouze up. Eternal
death is abroad
. . .
Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion
Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time
For lo! the Night of Death is past and the
Eternal Day
Appears upon our Hills: Awake Jerusalem,
and come away.
(96:33-34)
Having learned the
lesson of self-annihilation (as in Jesus's
birth), he stops trying to save himself by hiding in death, and gives
himself up completely:
. . . Albion . . . threw himself
in the Furnaces of affliction
All was a Vision, all a Dream: the Furnaces became
Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity Divine.
(96:35-37)
Just as forgiveness
brought flowing waters out of Mary's agony, so sacrifice of Self leads to
the joy of "living fountains of waters" (cf. Revelation 7:17),
in a combination of forgiveness and transfiguration.
The final Vision has
removed the doubt and despair which blocked such an
awareness. A renewed humanity still creates space and time, same
kind of world viewed differently, renewed, but now they are created
through imagination and not through fear and separation (98:30-31). Even
death still exists:
. . . & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen inregenerations terrific or
complacent varying
According to the subject of discourse & every Word & Every
Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or
Opakeness of Nervous fibres
such was the variation of Time & Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary & they walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly
seen
And seeing: according to fitness & order. (98:33-40)
This is exactly the
same world which has appeared throughout Jerusalem, but now we see it
from the perspective of eternal Vision instead of fallen vision. The Eye
altering alters all. The opaqueness of Satan and the sensual contraction
of Reuben still exist in this apocalypse, but when seen with eternal
Vision they are shorn of their terrors.
The One Man in
eternity has already spoken on plate 4:
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking
recompense!
Ye are my members O ye sleepers of Beulah, land of shades!
(4:18-21)
Since they were
spoken at the beginning of the poem, these echoes of Jeremiah 23:23, John
17:23, and John 15:4 do not suddenly appear at the end of Jerusalem ; they could have been heard by Albion
the first time. From this point of view, all the errors and terrors of Jerusalem
have been simply a sleep. Like the apostles at the transfiguration, Albion needs but to awaken to see Jesus. But even
though this fundamental safety net exists, the death and the agony are no
less real, for man's fallen vision creates for him a life in which Jesus
does not exist, for if Jesus were there, he would not die. Or, more
exactly, with the present of Jesus fully recognized, every death becomes
a resurrection.
Transfiguration is a
particularly apt word for Blake's art, even though he never used the word
himself. For just as the copperplate artist exactly shapes his figures
with engraving and etching, so Blake delineates his figures exactly, so
that when they are reversed, they become completely other even while
remaining essentially what they were. <28> In spiritual terms, the doubts
and despairs are burned away so that all of existence stands clear. And
the same existence that was so full of agony and separation is perceived
to be eternity itself:
All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all
Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing
And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.
(99:1-4)
Even death itself,
when perceived with eternal Vision, is reversed into larger life.
The transfiguration
that Blake works on the Bible is based on a method of presenting
oppositions and then transforming them, much as happens at the
transfiguration of Jesus. "Monos o Iesous" combines apparently opposites
qualities of Jesus which must be seen as simultaneous, even while
mutually contradictory. In alluding to both these passages Blake puts us
on notice that we are about to receive a new revelation. Blake thus puts
himself in the line of and indeed in the place of the prophets and of
Jesus himself in offering us a new voice which, addressed to Christian,
Jew, and Deist, will offer us new ways to live as human souls.
Notes to Chapter 8: Monos o Iesous
1. Thomas J.J.
74-75.
2. Illuminated
Blake, p. 283.
3. Altizer, p. 73.
4. When the
connection between Blake and Cusanus first occurred to me in 1979, I
could find no one else who had made the connection. I was therefore
delighted to see the 1980 publication of Symbol and Truth in Blake's
Myth, by Leopold Damrosch, who devotes several pages to the
similarities. His most useful overall statement emphasizes how
fundamental the coincidentia oppositorum is to both Blake and
Cusanus:
Like Blake, Cusanus stresses the coincidentia oppositorum
and the supra-rational vision or Nous
that apprehends their harmonious union in the Infinite. Now, the
reconciliation of opposites was commonplace in the eighteenth century; as
E. R. Wasserman has shown, concordia discors is the fundamental principle of Denham's Cooper
Hill and Pope's Windsor Forest. [Subtler Language ,
chapters 3-4)) But these poets postulated a God above and beyond the
sublunary realm who harmonized opposites by manipulating them in a larger
whole, the lights and shadows of a grand design. Cusanus, like Blake in
his 'marriage' of heaven and hell, sought a vital union of
opposites in the ultimate order of things, not a reconciliation
controlled, as it were, from above. For Cusanus the ultimate order is
God, 'because He is Himself the Absolute Ground, in which all otherness (alteritas) is unity, and all diversity is
identity.' By the time of the prophetic books, Blake too invested Jesus,
in however heterodox a manner, with the same status of ultimate ground of
diversity-in-identity. (p. 21)
5. Michael Tolley, "William Blake's Use of the Bible,"
Dissertation, University
of London, 1974),
p. 367.
6. The Poems of
William Blake (NY: Longman, 1989), p. 630.
7. William Blake:
The Complete Poems (NY: Penguin, 1977), p. 997.
8. Joseph Wicksteed, William Blake's Jerusalem:
A Commentary (London:
Trianon, n.d.), pp.
117-18.
9. Anne Mellor, Blake's
Human Face Divine (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), pp.
292-93.
10. Blake's
Poetry and Designs (NY: Norton, 1979), p. 313.
11. 30 January 1803,
E727.
11a. Behrendt, Reading,
p. 165.
12. The same story
is told in Matthew 17 and Mark 9, without the word "Monos" next to "Iesous"
and with the significant omission of the apostles' falling asleep.
13. Prophecy and
the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and
Shelley (Univ. of
Alabama, 1985), p. 73.
14. Hoagwood, p. 78.
15. Illuminated
Blake, p. 284.
16. Compare this
observation by W. J. T. Mitchel:
his choices of unusual subjects (Newton inscribing his mathematical
diagrams, . . . Christ writing on the ground to confound the scribes and pharisees) suggest that the moment of inscription
tended to stand out for him as a principal subject for illustration in
any narrative. ("Visible," p. 64)
17. Carl Jung, Answer
to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull (1958; rpt. Princeton,
1973), p. 81.
18. Compare this
stunning and hilarious outburst from the Devil in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell:
if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the
greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten
commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath .
. . [other examples] I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking
these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not
from rules. (E43)
19. Jerusalem 37, mirror writing in
illumination.
20. The Divine
Image, p. 9.
21. Altizer, p. xi.
22. I do not
subscribe to the theories of the "anxiety of influence" as
proposed by Harold Bloom in, for example, The Anxiety of Influence
(NY: OUP, 1973). Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr.,
writing specifically of Blake's relationship to Milton, counters Bloom's
ideas: The notion that Blake suffered under the anxiety of influence,
that he was obsessed by a drive to transcend Milton, even at the cost of
misrepresenting and misinterpreting him, is antithetical not only to the spirit
of Blake's rejoinder to Lavater but to the principle of art that Blake
enunciates in A Descriptive Catalogue:
'To suppose that Art can go beyond the finest specimens of Art that are
now in the world,' Blake says, 'is not knowing what Art is; it is being
blind to the gifts of the spirit' (p. 535 [i.e., E535]). (Angel of Apocalypse, p. 250)
Furthermore, Bloom's
theory is based on a metaphor of limited space: the strong poet must
shoulder aside his predecessor because there is not enough space for both
of them to occupy. Blake, however, does not assume a finite space which
only one poet can occupy at a time. Instead, each artist-Christian, in
the expression of his own Poetic Genius, is at once a unique individual
and a manifestation of Eternity. The question of fighting for elbow room
simply does not arise. The inextricability of fallen and eternal Vision
is not a concession to fallen vision and its shrunken notions of space
and time; it is rather a transfiguration of space and time into a larger
understanding.
23. In her
dissertation, William Blake's New Typology and the Revaluation of
Prophecy in the Eighteenth Century (Emory University, 1979), Patricia
Elizabeth Davis studies Europe, Milton , and the Job illustrations in the context of
eighteenth-century interpretations of the Bible. According to Davis, "Blake
invented a new typology, transforming his prophetic poems into primers
for creative exegesis" (p. 2). Basing her study on an idea of recta
ratio , "which affirms that what a man knows
depends upon what, as a moral being, he chooses to make himself" (p.
3), she compares Blake's progressive revelation through prophecy to the
methods of his contemporaries, such as Calvin and Wesley.
Davis's dissertation
is part of the effort to rectify "the paucity of background studies
necessary for a pursuit of Blake's relationship to the biblical
traditions available in his own time," which is lamented by Leslie Tennenbaum in Biblical Tradition in Blake's Early
Prophecies (Princeton UP, 1982), p. x. Tannenbaum's
book raises typology to a definition of Blake's art: "By defining
Christ as the Imagination, Blake adopts as his subject the typological
process itself" (p. 99).
Setting Blake's
early prophecies within their contemporary biblical traditions,
Tannenbaum sees them, especially The Book of Los, as containing
"a prospect of the road leading to Jerusalem" (280)
because they invert and parody but do nothing direct to "bring to a
period the cyclical pattern" (p. 280) which the Bible would be
without the Book of Revelation:
Through Los's forging of the sun in Asia and in The
Book of Los, Blake reveals that he has begun to realize that the road
to Eternity is the road that leads ahead, leading the Imagination further
into the demon universe; it must continue to create the human illusion
until this illusion has been embodied in all its variety at the same time
that it becomes condensed into a single unifying image. Only then, as in
Revelation, when the body oferror has been completely
revealed, will the body of truth reappear, will the heavenly bride
descend and meet the bridegroom, and will Blake simultaneously fulfil and annihilate the great code of art. (p. 281)
I am pleased to see
that this final paragraph of Tannenbaum's book
confirms my approach here.
24. Nicholas of
Cusa's Dialectical Mysticism: Text, Translation, and Interpretive Study
of De Visione Dei. 2nd rev ed.
(Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1988), p. 41.
25. Cyprian Smith, The
Way of Paradox (London: Darton, Longman and
Todd, 1987), p. 27.
26. Cyprian Smith,
p. 27.
27. Cyprian Smith,
p. 77.
28. For a fuller
discussion of the reversals in Blake's physical act of producing his
illuminated books, see previous chapter.
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