fear founded the gods

Much of the critical world--about 200 overlapping years worth--has assumed William Blake's work is primarily (or straightforwardly) Christian; the other part--the 5 secular decades closer to us--argues that the only God Blake identifies in his writing is the one in the human imagination. These are not mutually exclusive positions in Blake. In fact, Blake reconciles religious communion to secular projection all over the place. Then there are those critics who decide to leave the question of gods and monsters behind entirely to write of the unprecedented strength of Blake's heroines or--alternatively--to write of Blake's misogyny and the limitations of his female allegories. Or they write histories, biographies, contexts, about Blake's politics, about Blake's revolutions, or they write about Blake's everyday lack of interest in politics, about his fear of sedition, or his fear of more bloodletting. Or they write about Blake's textual erasures, Blake's dissolving systems of signification, or about his textual "walls," or about his signs of negation, of annihilation. Or they write about his printing process, about his artistry, about his money. About his wife. Funny thing, too: since the terrorist attacks of 9-11, the critical world has taken a reactionary turn towards a renewed interest in ethics and religion, and guess what? Blake is being claimed as a Christian poet again.

A couple of you have pulled me aside now, as though in secret. As though you and I share a confidence: "but what does Blake really believe?" This is a good question, a productive question, yes, if you're not too quick to grasp at what you see, given that the first thing you generally see in Blake is nothing more than yourself. What you believe Blake must believe. I wonder (genuinely): until I've identified what I believe Blake must believe because I believe it myself, can I do more than grasp at my own reflection in these texts? Is my mistaking myself for Blake an act of possession Blake would choose to expose? Am I feeding the finite Ratio?

***

Here is a slice from Geoffrey Hartman’s article, “‘Was it for this...?’ Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods,” a really gorgeous example of critical lore that summons the atheist from Blake without squelching the believer:

An old dictum runs that fear founded the gods. The eighteenth century produced a number of sophisticated genealogies expounding the idea. "It was fear,” Vico remarks, “which created gods in the world, not fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves.” That fear, interpreted as self-astonishment, is then connected with figurative language, or with the idiom of our ancestors the giants. Blake also linked fear to figuration, though of a distorted kind. His visionary poems show a continual theogony whose ‘big bang’ is the self-astonishment of an imagination that shrinks from its own power and then abdicates it to the priests. By this recession it also produces the void described in the first lines of Genesis, and a God who has to create something from that nothing. Our present religiously reduced imagination continues to exnihilate creation, that is, to understand created nature as the product of a creator who has raised it from nothing (ex nihilo). The result is a flawed image of power that has inscribed itself in domestic, political, and religious institutions--it has become a second nature, and frozen the hierarchy of human and divine. (emphasis mine, 15-6)

***