William Blake

The Argument

William Blake is the strangest and most theologically complex figure in English Romanticism — a man who rejected orthodox Christianity while being saturated with biblical imagery, who created his own mythology while insisting that imagination is the divine reality, and who saw the Industrial Revolution as a spiritual catastrophe at a time when most of his contemporaries were celebrating it. He is not easily claimed by any tradition, but literary apologetics cannot ignore him.

Blake's quarrel with Christianity was not with Christ but with what he called Priest-craft — the institutional religion that he believed had turned the liberating vision of Jesus into a system of moral control. His Songs of Innocence and of Experience map the movement from a world of unself-conscious delight to a world of repression and suffering, and he blamed organized religion for much of that movement. This is a serious charge that requires a serious answer, not dismissal.

What Blake could not escape was the biblical narrative itself. His prophetic books — Milton, Jerusalem, The Four Zoas — are drenched in scriptural imagery and structured by something very like the master narrative: fall, redemption, restoration. He reached for transcendence with every tool available to him and refused the reductive materialism of his age. For a literary apologist, Blake is a witness to what happens when genuine spiritual hunger operates outside the constraints of orthodox theology: it produces visions of extraordinary power and systems that ultimately cannot hold.