‘The severely disabled Thierry revealed that, contrary to appearances, he led an intensely aware and emotional inner life,’ PAGE 24


Unorthodox exegesis


Blake and the Bible Christopher Rowland


YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 320PP, £30 ■Tablet bookshop price £27


W Tel 01420 592974


e are already used to many Blakes: poet, painter, printmaker, visionary;


incendiary radical; the Jacobin iconoclast of Reza Sabri-Tabrizi’s pioneering political analysis; the Beat Blake; the hippy Blake; the Blake who attracts the attention of “ufologists” and alien-hunters. At first glance, the idea of Blake the theologian is almost as absurd and disturbing, for surely this was an artist and thinker who set his face against the religion of the Book, and elevated personal vision above recorded tradition? As Christopher Rowland makes clear,


Blake is not an orthodox exegete, but his questions about the nature of monotheism in antiquity (to give just one powerful example) strikingly anticipate contemporary biblical scholarship. This is a tricky suggestion, putting undue emphasis on the more dramatic side of Blake’s “prophetic” writing. As Rowland reminds us, “prophecy” is compounded of one small part “fore-telling”, the ecstatic yeast in a much larger body of “forth-telling”. Blake, to nail this down straight away, didn’t prophesy in the usual sense, and didn’t claim to. Nevertheless, his prophetic books, which Northrop Frye said were the most important unread poetry in English, do show an uncommonly fine intuition for the content and contexts of the Bible texts and while Blake didn’t live long enough to benefit from new discoveries and translations – Archbishop Laurence’s translation of the vital Ethiopic Book of Enoch only appeared in 1821, just six years before Blake’s death – he seemed aware of their presence, or redacted absence in Holy Writ. Blake may have been the antagonist of outward religion, and it is clear that what he means by “Babylon’” is not just the Catholic Church, but he had the skills and the learning of a churchman. Much of what Rowland has to say is at


least notionally familiar already, even to casual readers of the poetry, but his detailed and superbly contextualised account is an important corrective to those who spout Blake’s sayings – about murdering infants in cradles, about Tygers, and Horses of Instruction – as if they contained unambiguous moral messages and calls to action. In fact, Blake was profoundly opposed to the idea of the Bible


Rowland’s analysis of the late


illustrations for the book of Job is a virtuoso example of close analysis, imagery balanced against carefully redacted text, theodicy and formal aesthetic organisation within one complex frame. What he offers us is a not just a new way of reading Blake, but Blake as a new way of reading Scripture. This is an idea developed from D.W. Dörrbecker’s insistence that Blake’s semantic and visual ambiguities force us as readers/viewers to “live through the works again and again, to invest personally in the act of reading”. Rowland does something similar, but while his pages are dense with cross-references that inevitably halt progress, one soon learns to find the main thread of his virtuosic argument. Most revisionist Blakes are mere costume drama, squeezing him into revolutionary uniform or San Franciscan psychedelic bands. This one delivers him convincingly whole, in period, and aware of all periods of the Judaeo-Christian era. Brian Morton


Blake’s watercolour of An Allegory of the Bible, c. 1780. Tate, London


as a manual of moral and ethical instruction. He was drawn to Spirit rather than to Letter, to a religion of immanence rather than transcendence, and to a rejection of the kind of dualism that saw good and evil, heaven and hell, soul and body, spiritual and physical not just in a state of war, but war which inevitably concluded with the triumph and apotheosis of one contender. Against this, Blake set up a theology, which has deep roots in the literature, that puts suffering, pain and what we might otherwise hose away as “evil” standing in a dynamic, dialectical relationship with their presumed opposites. This, of course, has profound implications for his understanding of both Satan and of God, who to Blake, as in the earliest sources, is invariably multiple. Rowland makes it clear that many of


Blake’s most startling exegeses are profoundly self-serving. He often elides or rewrites a passage if its cadence and meaning don’t quite suit. Possibly the best summing up of Rowland’s approach comes in this: “Blake’s mythology in Urizen is not the language of the Christian tradition but a specially coined mythology, inspired by the Bible, functioning as a heuristic lens through which to look at theology and ethics afresh.”


Tantur Ecumenical


Institute, Jerusalem is hosting


Mark: The Evangelist in the Landscape of Jesus.


A 2-week intensive course of lectures and travel in the Holy Land


12-26 September 2011 Cost: $2100 (U.S.)


Led by Tom O’Loughlin, Professor, University of Nottingham UK .


Contact: Rector, tantur@netvision.net.il


Additional information and applications:


www.tantur.org under programs.


25 June 2011 | THE TABLET | 23


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