Blakes's Sources

Blake's Sources

Blake's Sources Although he was many other things, Blake might well be considered a "man of books". His reading was omnivorous. He might also be considered a Renaissance man if such a thing were possible in the 19th Century. In The Sacred Wood T.S.Eliot wrote an essay on Blake. He found him lacking in the poetic tradition. Kenneth Rexroth wrote more excisively about Eliot's relation to Blake; he referred to Blake's sources as "the tradition of organized heterodoxy." And this from a lecture given by Kathleen Raine: "Blake's sources and reading proved to be not 'odds and ends' as T.S. Eliot had rather rashly described them. On the contrary, Blake's sources proved to be the mainstream of human wisdom. It was the culture of his age that was provincial, whereas Blake had access to the 'perennial philosophy', an excluded knowledge in the modern West in its pursuit of the natural sciences in the light of a materialist philosophy." Blake was not 'unlettered'! Quite the contrary he was a modern throwback to medievalism when 'it all' could be known; he knew all of which Eliot knew nothing. Bacon, Newton (and presumably Eliot) cared little for these cultures, but Blake included them in his 'library' of acquaintance. He despised Bacon and Newton as shallow materialists. in a Letter to Flaxman Blake wrote "Now my lot in the Heavens is this; Milton lovd me in childhood & shewd me his face, Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet, but Shakespeare in riper years gave me his hand; Paracelsus & Behmen appeard to me." His "nodding acquaintance" was actually much, much broader. Here are some of the disciplines that Blake had at least a nodding acquaintance with: Some of Blake's Sources Swedenborg Homer Plato Plotinus Hermes Paracelsus Boehme Dante Shakespeare Milton Michaelangelo Bacon, Newton, and Locke Berkeley The Bible Swedenborg In the 18th century Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist, philosopher and religionist, had a very high reputation. In London a 'new church' sprang up espousing his values. William Blake's parents were members of the New Church. That probably explains several interesting things about Blake's early life. For example his father appear to be about as permissive as the average modern father in our culture today, but very atypical for his generation. . Blake was imbued with a great many of the famous man's values, particularly his esoteric religious ones. As a young adult Blake found many of the same ideas among the great thinkers of the ages. He became less dependent on Swedenborg's thought forms. With MHH Plates 21 and 22 he declared his independence of his childhood teacher. Perhaps the chief objection of the mature Blake was that Swedenborg had a positive demeanour re the established church: O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches; Showing the Transgressors in Hell, the proud Warriors in Heaven, Heaven as a Punisher, and Hell as One under Punishment; With Laws from Plato and his Greeks to renew the Trojan Gods In Albion, and to deny the value of the Saviour's blood. The reader no doubt recalls that Samson was shorn of his locks by Delilah, leading to the loss of his unusual strength. But one of the things that stayed with Blake was Swedenborg's concept of the Divine Humanity . To Tirzah (K 220) was a concise summary of Swedenborg's teaching (Golgonooza page 96.) A Vision of the Last Judgment, page 84: Around the Throne Heaven is opend & the Nature of Eternal Things Displayd All Springing from the Divine Humanity Although Blake owed much to Michaelangelo, his Vision of the Last Judgment was more closely related to Swedenborg's; Michaelangelo' picture had an exoteric orientation, while that of Swedenborg and Blake had a mystical one. To put it otherwise the great Italian painter suggested a material event some time in the future, while the other two concerned spiritual rather than material realities. Swedenborg and Blake, but not Michaelangelo, perceived the Last Judgment as an end and a beginning, or a death and rebirth (of individuals, nations, and the world). Swedenburg has another very significant contribution to the thought forms of Blake in what they both referred to as states. A state is a condition through which a person travels in his journey through life. One can also recognize a close correspondence between Swedenborg and Blake relative to an inveterate hostility toward the established church (cfWilliam Blake and the Radical Swedenborgians page 99). Swedenburg taught that there had been 27 churches, those of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Solomon...Paul, Constantine,Charlemayne and Luther. Blake substantially agreed with that: Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States. States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease: You cannot go to Eternal Death in that which can never Die. Satan & Adam are States Created into Twenty-seven Churches. (Milton 32:22-25 erd 321) The first ones were Adam, Seth..., and the last one as I recall was Luther. After which the same old round began again to repeat itself in the Great Year, a depressing form of church history. Neither Blake nor Swedenborg thought much of the organized church. The latter thought that it had passed out, to be replaced by a new church in the New Age. He dated it at 1757, the year of Blake's birth as it happened. According to Raine it was "Swedenburg whose leading doctrine Blake summarized in the Everlasting Gospel". But this is a very difficult poem; not really a poem but intermittent snatches of poetic thought. Very hard to understand because Blake's mood and tone modulates continually, sometimes ironic, sometimes not. It's a source book for whatever gems speak to you. (See also Chapter 7.) It does indicate rather clearly Blake's (and Swedenborg's) view about the organized church and conventional theology. Homer: The primary source of the Cave of the Nymphs is certainly Homer's Odyssey, while the Myth of Persephone stems of course from the Iliad.. "Then I came upon a marvellous clue in the works of Thomas Taylor the platonist, whose translations of the complete works of Plato, most of Plotinus, Proclus and the other Neoplatonic writings of the third century A.D were appearing contemporaneously with Blake's works." (from a lecture in India of Kathleen Raine re her initial search for Blake's sources) Taylor and Blake were almost the same age. Taylor, with his translations of Greek philosophy turned Blake's interest in this direction and led to his use of many of them in his search for symbolic material. Blake also used a great variety of 'spiritual' documents beginning before Plato and stretching down to his own day. Some of the writers were: Plato's Myth of the Cave can be seen as the locale of Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Here is the poetry. Here is a short introduction to Plato's philosophy; it closely parallels Blake's myth. Plotinus: Platonism, neoPlatonism- Blake may have been more of the latter than the former. He used Thomas Taylor's translations extensively in his mythmaking. (If you're up for reading it, here's a colorful description of the man's life. Blake in particular depended heavily upon Taylor's Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries. Hermes Trismegistus: Wikipedia offers a useful introduction to this mythic figure. Blake included the Hermetic writings in his library and made use of them in his own creations. (Hermes Trismegistus has an introduction to this material.) The Divine Poemander was perhaps the most important of many works. In Jerusalem plate 91 Blake mentioned the Smaragdine Table of Hermes as the baleful influence on one of his failing characters. He endorsed Proposition 2: "What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of the one thing." but felt that Hermes was a magician trying to pass as a mystic. (Magicians try to pull the beyond down to the material, while mystics have visions of the Beyond.) Paracelsus introduced Blake to the rich symbolic language of astrology. Boehme's Divine Vision not only figured largely in Blake's works, but expressed most aptly his personal approach to creativity. Boehme provided one of many sources for Blake's doctrine of the descent (or fall) of Albion (man): "The one only element fell into a division of four.. and that is the heavy fall of Adam...for the principle of the outward world passeth away and goeth into ether and the four elements into one again, and God is manifested. Blake expressed "the division of four" of course with the Four Zoas. (Percival p 19). The divided four represent the principalities against which Paul wrestled (as he wrote in Ephesians 6:12). Blake illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy (Many of these pictures are onlinehere).

Urizen

Urizen

With the conception of Urizen Blake began the most serious stage of his war with the conventional God. In fact his battle with God provided the creative energy for the development of his entire mythology, particularly the series of poems known as the Lambeth books and the first major attempt at an epic, 'The Four Zoas'. 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem' were written after the battle was won.

---

The 'Book of Urizen' is at one level a brutal burlesque of the Creation story found in Genesis. More properly it offers an alternative to the biblical story, based upon Neo-platonic metaphysics. Blake took the Gnostic demiurge, something much less than the Supreme Being, and merged it with the Old Testament God into a diabolic parody.

Tremendous meaning may doubtless be found in this book, the Genesis of Blake's Bible of Hell. Some knowledgeable interpreters see in it a superwise man offering supersubtle insight to the devotees and adepts who have pursued his truth. But a plain man's view suggests that B.U. comes from the pen of an angry young man. Most of us have shut out youthful anger. We pass our days having closed off our consciousness from the horror of life that surrounds us. In that way we can sleep at night and forget that we live in a filthy world, a place where ten year old children hang for trivial crimes and five year olds learn to climb the insides of tall back chimneys. Comparable things are happening in our town today, but we simply don't dwell on those sorts of things; we learn to be positive thinkers.

But men like Blake and Vincent van Gogh couldn't shut those images out. Van Gogh died in an insane asylum. Blake had a more creative solution; he wrote the 'Book of Urizen'. Someone is finally and ultimately responsible for the horror of the world. He blamed God or rather the image of God projected by his fellow men. Anyone gifted with a real relationship with God has had similar feelings.

At the deepest level B.U. comes through as a cry of pain: the God who made this black world in which we live in chains has to be a monster. And Blake offers some very imaginative ideas as to how he got that way. He fell from Eternity; he fell before Creation; and then he created an awful mess. Then he gave us laws to live by that shrink us up more and more from what we might be. William Blake is noted for the Divine Vision. But B.U. is the diabolic vision, the Bible of Hell. Before ecstasy there is agony. In B.U. Blake poignantly articulates the darkness before the dawn.

The really exciting thing about 'The Four Zoas' is the long incubation and eventual birth of Blake's new, positive image of God concurrent with the thorough and definite laying to rest of the old one. These realities become vivid once the reader gains sufficient familiarity with the material to see the underlying currents of spiritual movement. If you like poetry, 4Z contains many beautiful lines interspersed throughout the nine Nights amidst long, bleak desert passages describing fallenness. The beautiful passages mark stirrings of the Spirit. (It has great similarity in fact to the style of Isaiah, who wrote the most beautiful parts of the O.T. surrounded by unrelieved darkness.)

Follow the speeches of Enion, the primeval mother of Los and Enitharmon. In Night i her children's increasing depravity and her maternal love lead her down into the abyss of Non-entity, in her case an abyss of consciousness. She becomes a disembodied voice sounding a note of reality over the general fallenness as it progressively develops. Her comments throughout the action preserve the feeling of human oneness that will break forth at the darkest hour. In Enion Blake found a new voice expressing a passionate love that laments but doesn't excoriate, and a faith, evolved through suffering, that the Divine Image will come to redeem. These of course are the most creative themes of the Old Testament, slowly evolving out of its generally primitive theology. Enion's speeches at the conclusion of Nights i, ii, and viii are too long to quote here, but they contain some of the most sublime poetry Blake wrote and portend the emergence of the new God of compassion.

In 4Z Blake elaborated and analyzed the God, Urizen, in the fullest detail; this version contains less heat and more light than we found in B.U. Urizen symbolizes man's thinking faculty; in the primary myth of the Fall he became estranged from his feelings. This story is told at least six times in 4Z. Blake devoted Night ii to Urizen's creation of a rocky, hard, opaque world of mathematical certainty and calculation. Anyone who has spent time on a college campus has met people highly developed intellectually and infantile emotionally. They lack the capacity to express any value more intense than "very interesting". Many of course have denied that value has any meaning. Imagine what kind of world they create, what spiritual climate they live in; there you have Urizen.

He is a God devoid of true feeling; he has feelings, but they're all false. He continually weeps, like the Old Testament God who wept as he punished people. He builds a world of law, devoid of feeling, devoid of compassion, devoid of humanity. His world is based upon fear of the future, and he attempts to secure himself against it at all costs. Fear defines his character and his actions until the very end of the fallen world. In Night viii Urizen is still fighting life and light. He sets out

...to pervert all the faculties of sense Into their own destruction, if perhaps he might avert His own despair even at the cost of everything that breathes.

There you find a preview of the God of the superpowers. Their fear has become the guiding principle leading them toward the destruction of "everything that breathes".

Urizen's initial downfall comes in Night iii. His emanation (in this case wife), Ahania, has followed Enion, the Earth Mother, into the abyss of consciousness. She tries to share with Urizen a level of truth that he finds so unpleasant that he casts her out, and promptly falls himself like Humpty Dumpty. In Ahania's vision we have a psychologically acute and penetrating description of the incipience of a false God. It ranks with the Bible's eloquent pre-psychological denunciations of idolatry, as found for example in Isaiah 40. Blake re-used this passage in 'Jerusalem', attesting its authenticity even on the illumined side of the Divine Vision:

"Then Man ascended mourning into the splendors of his palace,
Above him rose a Shadow from his wearied intellect
Of living gold, pure, perfect, holy; in white linen he hover'd,
A sweet entrancing self delusion, a wat'ry vision of Man
Soft exulting in existence, all the Man absorbing.

Man fell upon his face prostrate before the wat'ry shadow,
Saying, "O Lord, whence is this change? thou knowest I am nothing." ...
Idolatrous to his own Shadow, words of Eternity uttering:
"O I am nothing when I enter in judgment with thee.
"If thou withdraw thy breath I die and vanish into Hades;
"If thou dost lay thine hand upon me, behold I am silent;
"If thou withhold thine hand I perish like a fallen leaf.
"O I am nothing, and to nothing must return again.
"If thou withdraw thy breath, behold I am oblivion."

In this parody of the Psalmist Blake shows us a fundamental truth about man's image of the transcendental God. He doesn't deny the reality of a transcendental God as some of his interpreters have concluded. He denies the truth of man's image of the transcendental God, an entirely different matter.

He opposes the ascribing of qualities to the Wholly Other. According to Blake when that is done the result is something less than man. Worshipping this sub-human God the worshipper becomes something less than man himself. He represses a portion of his humanity, which Blake here calls Luvah, and that repressed portion falls upon him and afflicts him with boils from head to toe. The penalty for idolatry is brokenness and suffering, consciousness of sin, guilt, division, finitude, envy, the torments of love and jealousy, the whole bit of man's unfortunate fallen circumstances. It's all caused by the false God that man has chosen. Isaiah understood a part of this; he recognized some of the idols of others but not his own. Thomas Altizer, in his book on Blake, rightly took this passage as a critical revelation of the "death of God".

Man worships a shadow of his wearied intellect. No higher God is possible without the wholeness that Christ brings. Worship of a shadow of our wearied intellect leads to all the false and fatal evils that we visit upon one another from simple vanity to war.

The Journey

I

The Journey

       We live in a secular age; the reality of God has been largely barred from the consciousness of most people. It is a significant experience for only a minority of the population. Of course many people understand that everyone has a God of some sort--his ultimate concern. But the biblical God, the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is not a live issue in the minds of very many people today. Our foremost modern psychologist, C.G.Jung, quite properly placed God in our unconscious and encouraged us to seek there for him. Jung understood very well Blake's statement that "all deities reside in the human breast" (end of Plate 11 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

Rosenwald LOC
Plate 11 of MHH

       The secular currents so powerful today were already flowing strongly in the late 18th Century in England. The prevalent deism put God back behind the present scene, a long way behind it. Strictly the Divine Architect, having made the world like a clock, he wound it up and left it to run on its own. He also left the deists to their own devices, and they were happy in this new freedom. They felt that they had learned to control their destinies without divine assistance.

       Blake lived in the midst of these currents, but he opposed them emphatically. Unlike the deists he experienced the immediate presence and pervasive reality of God in his life. He completely filled his poetry and pictures alike with metaphysical images because his mind dwelt almost exclusively upon spiritual themes. The material realm interested him only as a shadow of the eternal. He abhored the materialism by which the deists lived. He might have been happier and more at home in the Middle Ages.

       But he was also a very modern man. He understood better than Jung that an external objective God is an unknown quantity, a projection of unsophisticated minds:

       "Mental things are alone Real....Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the mind of a Fool?" (Vision of the Last Judgment, Erdman page 565)

       The only God anyone can know is the image of God projected upon his mind or enclosed in his consciousness. Since time began, men have shared their visions of God with one another. All religions began in this way. The Bible makes most sense as an infinitely fascinating compendium of the visions of God shared by Moses, Isaiah, Paul and the other writers. This unfolding and composite vision has shaped western culture down to the present moment.

       Blake thoroughly surveyed this passing scene, not just the Bible, but every other religious document he could get his hands on, and related them all to his own direct and immediate visions. Over his lifetime he may have taken more liberties with God than any other systematic thinker ever did. He could do this because he so fully realized that all of these visions of God had come forth from human breasts like his own. Moses, Isaiah, and the others were his eternal brothers, and he joyously engaged with them in the eternal war, the intellectual war, which he called the "severe contentions of friendship" (J. 91:17).

i A Political God

       The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you (Romans 2:24).

       From the beginning Blake realized the close and intimate relationship between a person's image of God and his political views. The authoritarian image in some form finds favor with establishment types, authority figures and all others who perceive their welfare as dependent upon the status quo. These people feel threatened by unrest in the social levels below their own; they look to God, their primary symbol of authority, to control it. They impose this vision of God upon society, and they use their power to control and discourage alternative visions.

       Liberal types in contrast more likely entertain an image of a benevolent God, a God of mercy whose basic activity is not to control the lower classes but to lift them up, nurture the needy, provide for the poor, and protect them from the rapacious powerful.

       Blake found both types of men among the authors of the Bible; they project the two basic images of God side by side. His simplified schema of interpretation assigned to the two types the designations of priest and prophet. The priest upholds the authority of the past, the authority of tradition. The prophet sees a burning bush and hears a new word which judges the authority and tradition of the priest and invokes a new scene, new ideas, new forms, new life.

       Rather obviously Jesus belonged to the prophetic type. He had as a fundamental aim raising our consciousness of the benevolence of God. He incarnated God, and he was supremely benevolent to all but the priestly party. They suppressed him in the flesh, and in his resurrected body they have always attempted to remake him in their image. As he warned, they have used his name to control, suppress, and even exterminate large numbers of people who would not do as they were told. Blake's real mission in life, both before and after his Moment of Grace, was to rescue the world's image of God from the preemption of the priestly party.

       The conventional understanding of God is that he will get you and put you in a dark hot place forever if you don't do exactly as you are told, by his priest of course. In 1741, sixteen years before Blake's birth, a New England divine named Jonathan Edwards wrote and delivered a sermon which he named, ""; historians tell us that it scared literally thousands of people into the Christian church. A similiar vision of God Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God has haunted multitudes before and after Blake even down to the present day. Besides the superstitious fear it has aroused, this understanding of God has contributed to oceans of blood shed by well meaning Christians through the ages.

       Relating this conventional understanding to one of Blake's earliest experiences, his brief career in school yields a distinctive image of God as a Transcendental Schoolmaster. As soon as Blake reached the age of reason, he rejected such a God as radically and unequivocally as he had rejected the flesh and blood schoolmaster. He saw such an image of God standing at the apex of a pyramid of human unhappiness, of exploitation, oppression, misery and hatred. He saw the divine right of kings and all those who derive their authority from the Crown. He saw their lackey priests extorting tithes from the people, collected by the 18th century equivalent of the IRS, and often giving little in return.

       He saw the emerging divine right of industrialists to work seven year old children fourteen hours a day at hard labor and reward them with a pittance. This image of God was most horrendously embodied in the judges and executioners who disposed of the child criminals. He saw the press gangs with royal authority to capture and drug anyone lacking upper class credentials; their poor victims woke up aboard ship in a state of virtual slavery, and following the brave Roman tradition they learned to fear their officers more than the enemy. Blake felt an intense mystic union with the suffering masses and even the suffering masters: he knew that a prison officer has to be just as sick as the men he guards.

LOC Rosenwald
Marriage of Heaven and Hell

       All these social programs were devised to teach poor devils to do what they were told, and behind them all stood the grim Transcendental Schoolmaster with the god sized birch rod. How could a self respecting person with any human sensitivity be other than an atheist! But Blake was never an atheist. Somehow he had to come to terms with God. If the above were a true representation of God, then he would rebel against God with his last breath. The young Blake identified with Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost: such a God is a sneaking serpent, and Blake would spend his life as the just man raging in the wild

 Schizophrenia might be the normal reaction to certain social conditions.
       The August Schoolmaster exists to enforce good and to prohibit or punish evil. The trouble with good and evil is that in this fallen world they are always defined by the man with the biggest stick. He of course sees himself as the likeness of God, God's earthly representative. So the most oppressive tyrant, the most colossal mass murderer, the most authentic Caesar becomes the Son of Heaven. The list is long and gruesome, and Blake knew his history.

Blake's God 2

       Full understanding of Blake's vision of God depends upon a grasp of his concepts of time and eternity. For Blake the eternal is the realm of the real, while time is the dimension of Plato's mortal cave of phantasmal dreams. Although the eternal is immortal, it does not refer simply to the hereafter; that would be just a phantasmal portion of time stretched out indefinitely. The eternal is the Mental, the Imaginative, the world to which a man may awaken as soon as he realizes that the corporeal, temporal, materialistic framework of reality is an illusion.

       The rationalists of Blake's day with their radical materialism had closed themselves off from the eternal. They had imprisoned themselves in what he called the mundane shell (Milton plate 17 line 16ff). They were exclusively this worldly. Blake perceived that they worshipped the God of this World, no matter what they called him. They had most often called him Jehovah or Jesus. As a young man Blake renamed him Urizen . He spent half a lifetime studying this God of the timebound so he could cast him off and replace him with a more authentic image. Eventually he came to realize that this god's truest name is Satan. He also referred to him as the Selfhood (Jerusalem 5:21-23) and the Spectre.

LOC Rosenwald
Jerusalem, Plate 6

       Blake tells us that radical materialism with its worship of the God of this World is a state of mind from which a man may awaken at any moment into a realization of the infinite and of his kinship with the Divine Man, Jesus. So these two Gods, the Satan of the World and the Jesus of Eternity, remain in continuous opposition in men's minds, and they are best understood in contrast to one another.

       Jesus is the Lord of the Eternal realm, which is imaginative, creative, non-violent, gracious, and above all forgiving and uniting into life. Satan is God of this World, of power, might, law, man against man, separation, finally death. One is Lord of Life, the other the Lord of Death. Satan is actually not a person but a state and will eventually go to his own place, which is a way of saying that Jesus will eventually get him off our backs. This happens at the Last Judgment when all Error is burnt up.

Blake's God

This is taken from Notes to the Blake's Primer.


Blake's God
       Some understanding of Berkeley's thought is a good preliminary to understanding the shape of Blake's mature vision of God, which came to him definitively about 1800.

       You can say nothing other than the products of your mind, which means that an objective God is a complete unknown; Blake would say there's no such thing:

Mental Things are alone Real what is Calld Corporeal Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place it is in Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool.
       (From, A Vision of The Last Judgment)

       In Blakean theology Jesus is the only God; not the man named Jesus: he's only a man. No! Blake's Jesus is the indwelling spirit within the psyche- the fount of imagination and forgiveness. Jesus is One.

       Thus, when the two Great Commandments meld together, the neighbor we're exhorted to love is the God within the other. So to love God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength involves loving God in all the particulars-- not just your neighbor, but his animals, insects, sticks and stones. Nature thus becomes what is groaning in travail; to love and care for it is to love God. "God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men" (MHH plate 16). 

---

People think of God as a bearded old gentlemen sitting up in Heaven, The Quakers think of 'that of God in every man' (George Fox). Blake came to see that God is an image in a person's mind.  So do Kate and Jane have the same God? by no means.  Each one has his or her image of God.

From Blake's Good and Evil:

Good and Evil are a polarity, and a contrary of the pristine oneness of the original Garden. We may see it as thefirst contrary, from which all others sprang. We live in a dualistic world, and people in general can only see things in black and white (like infants do). To perceive things as a spectrum, such as 'Good, less good, still less good,' etc. is a step away from the fatal tree, but still a long way from the primeval oneness from which we came and to which we are destined to return."

Jesus said, and Blake would agree, that 'we are all one':
John 17:
[20] Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;
[21] That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
[22] And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
[23] I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

Here is an earlier post with the same name.

Illustrations of Paradise Lost 11

Michael Foretells the Crucifixion

Wiki Common
Linell Set

From Paradise Lost By John Milton (by Wikisource):

Book XI

 th' Arch-Angel soon drew nigh,
Not in his shape Celestial, but as Man
²⁴⁰Clad to meet Man; over his lucid Armes
A militarie Vest of purple flowd
..
²⁴⁵His starrie Helme unbuckl'd shew'd him prime
In Manhood where Youth ended; by his side
As in a glistering Zodiac hung the Sword,
Satans dire dread, and in his hand the Spear.
Adam bowd low, hee Kingly from his State

[Michal speaking to Adam] 

In the Visions of God: It was a Hill
Of Paradise the highest, from whose top
The Hemisphere of Earth in cleerest Ken
³⁸⁰Stretcht out to amplest reach of prospect lay.
Not higher that Hill nor wider looking round,
Whereon for different cause the Tempter set
Our second Adam in the Wilderness,

Book XII

⁴¹⁰To save them, not thin own, though legal works.
For this he shall live hated, be blasphemed,
Seized on by force, judged, and to death condemned
A shameful and accurst, nailed to the Cross
By his own Nation, saline for bringing Life;
⁴¹⁵But to the Cross he nails thy Enemies,
The Law that is against thee, and the sins
Of all mankind, with him there crucified,
Never to hurt them more who rightly trust
In this his satisfaction; so he dies,
⁴²⁰But soon revives, Death over him no power
Shall long usurp; ere the third dawning light
Returns, the Stars of Morn shall see him rise
Out of his grave, fresh as the dawning light,