“The Human Form Divine”:
William Blake’s Theology of Imagination

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), January 27, 2008, by Dennis M. Welch, member of the Congregation and of the English Department at Virginia Tech.

In a work titled The Laocoön, Blake, who lived from 1757 to 1827 during the English Romantic Era, etched the following remarks:

The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination. that is God himself
The Divine Body ... Jesus we are his Members[.]

Notice the metaphoric linkages among these remarks: “The Eternal Body of Man” = “The Imagination” = “God himself The Divine Body” = “Jesus.” But how is man’s body, which we know to be physical, and therefore mortal, eternal? And how can man’s “Eternal Body” be said to constitute “The Imagination” and “God himself The Divine Body”? Still more puzzling, how can “Jesus” be related to all these terms, especially “The Imagination”? To the conventional and unconventional alike Blake’s metaphors here are not merely bold but unusual, paradoxical, and apparently blasphemous. Nonetheless, they are essential to understanding his humanistic theology.

His central term is “The Imagination,” which stands midway (literally) between “The Eternal Body of Man” and “God himself The Divine Body.” Why did Blake think all of these are not merely connected but equivalent? In a letter to Reverend John Trusler (23 Aug. 1799), he defined the imagination briefly as “Spiritual Sensation.” That Blake gave imagination a paradoxical definition, indicating that he considered it both a spiritual (and non-material) power and a sensory (or bodily) one, is important. The definition suggests something about the imagination that in Blake’s view is both true and crucial to his humanistic theology. Without the benefit of modern-day neuroscience, he like most of his contemporaries thought that what the imagination formulates (or imagines) derives initially from sensory or bodily experience but is itself immaterial in the mind. Hence, the imagination is “Spiritual Sensation” and because it is spiritual it is incorruptible or “Eternal,” Blake thought.

But why did he consider “The Eternal Body of Man” equivalent to “God himself The Divine Body”? This is where his notion of “Jesus” comes in. For perhaps even more important than the Resurrection to St. Paul was the Incarnation to Blake. And the reason why the Incarnation was so important to this poet-and-artist, was that it was a story of God becoming human, or rather of the divine and the human becoming one. This story implied to Blake that the human too could become divine. As he wrote in a work titled There is No Natural Religion , “God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is[.]” Indeed, the story of divinity’s descent into the human, the temporal, and the spatial seemed to confer on (or, at least, avail to) all of these the sacred, the infinite, and the eternal. “For every thing that lives is holy,” as Blake wrote repeatedly.

I’ve referred to the Incarnation as a story, because Blake didn’t concern himself much about an historical Jesus. That was the Jesus of the churches, over whom they have for centuries fought and even killed, while neglecting the central message of the story itself. If Blake differed from Paul about the Resurrection, he most certainly did not about that message, which is love : “... now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity,” wrote Paul (1 Cor. 13). And here is where the story of Blake’s “Jesus” involves the imagination—that spiritual and bodily, that incarnate, power. For more than anything else, Blake’s “Jesus” is a symbol, indeed The Symbol, representing capabilities of the imagination more perfectly than any other. Those capabilities involve the power of projection — the power of getting outside or projecting beyond oneself and putting one’s feet in others’ shoes. To Blake, imagination is not merely the power to pen poems and paint pictures. It is a way of life, a way of creative living, through selfless acts of love, kindness, and forgiveness.

Although Blake’s connection between imagination, love, and moral action preceded Percy Shelley’s in the Defense of Poetry, they are similar: “A man, to be greatly good, ... must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination... .” Acts of love, kindness, and forgiveness Blake himself referred to quite dramatically, perhaps over-dramatically, as “Self-Annihilation,” a phrase by which of course he did not mean self-destruction. Imaginative self-annihilation, by which we see, feel, and act from the perspective of others, constitutes what Blake meant by “Brotherhood” and, if he were living today, I’m confident he would include “Sisterhood” too.

Influenced perhaps by Paul’s reference to Christ as a servant of humanity (Phil. 2:7), Blake considered the Gospels to be not about kingship or authority but about creative service. “Did not Jesus descend & become a Servant?” Blake asked rhetorically in his annotations to Francis Bacon’s Essays. Because the Gospels are about creative service, Blake etched in The Laocoön that “Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists.” Summing up the story of fall and redemption concisely and a bit humorously, Blake’s Vision of the Last Judgment includes these remarks: “First God Almighty comes with a thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.” So, living a life of imagination is living an artful life, not to mention a healing and healthy one. Such a life can include any field of human endeavor: religion, science, medicine, engineering, business, athletics, parenthood, the arts, whatever.

Because Blake defined imagination and art so broadly, he wrote in a work titled All Religions are One that “Poetic Genius is the true Man.” Resorting often to the root-meanings of words, he did not mean that only the genius for writing poems makes one a true person. Instead, he used the word “Poetic” in its original sense, in the ancient Greek sense of poesis, meaning creative. And in Blake’s view we are all capable of creative genius in one form or another. Here’s how he put it in All Religions are One:

... Poetic Genius is the true Man... .
As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius[.] ...
The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius... .
As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) So all Religions & as all similars have one source.
The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius[.]

Though Blake was not a Unitarian — indeed, he attended no church regularly — his words here suggest an interesting variation of Unitarian-Universalism. To one degree or another, all of us possess poetic (i.e., creative) genius or imagination. It constitutes our true humanity and is the source of all religions. Therefore, all religions are fundamentally one. Or, as Blake put it in a work boldly titled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “... All deities reside in the human breast... . God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men. The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius.”

There is another way Blake’s humanistic theology resembles Unitarian-Universalism. And that is his emphasis on one God — not God the Father or the Holy Ghost but the human-divine God, Jesus, the Imagination that we all participate in by our own imaginative endeavors, or so Blake firmly believed.

Did he formulate his humanistic theology all at once? No, he did not. In brief, it evolved from a partly naturalistic Christology in poems like “To Spring” to a politically revolutionary but ambivalently millennial Christology represented in poems like America and then to a personally revolutionary and imaginative Christology represented in poems like Milton and Jerusalem. Stories of “Jesus’s” incarnation and self-sacrifice Blake interpreted not only from the Gospels but also from Milton’s Paradise Regained, where “Christ’s” participation in experience, his realization of his identity in doing so, and his transformation of the “Desert wild” into a new “Eden” constitute a new paradigm of imaginative identity and community. Blake’s greatest ideal is the realization of human-and-divine powers and identities in and through community that respects and cherishes each and every power and identity. Overall, his work revolutionizes the daring metaphor that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) by turning it around so that love (or imaginative identification with the others) is God. For Blake this is the great code of the art of life and the life of art, the great code of the human imagination.

Other Relevant Passages from Blake:

The following passages are quoted from the currently definitive printed edition of Blake’s writings: The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, with “Commentary” by Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor, 1988). Because Blake received little formal education, except in engraving and painting, his spelling, capitalization, and punctuation (as indicated above) are idiosyncratic, if not erratic.

... let thy holy feet visit our clime.
Come o’er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our love-sick land that mourns for thee

(from “To Spring”)

For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is God our father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is Man his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too[.]

(from “The Divine Image”)

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

(“The Lamb”)

“... the Greeks and since them the Moderns have neglected to subdue the gods of Priam [i.e., the gods of war]. These gods ... ought to be the servants and not the masters of man, or of society. They ought to be made to sacrifice to Man and not man ... to them”

(from A Descriptive Catalogue)

God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day[.]

(from Auguries of Innocence)

“Man is All Imagination. God is Man & exists in us & we in him”

(from Blake’s annotations to George Berkeley’s Siris)

“I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule & Deformity... . But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself”

(from Blake’s letter to Reverend Trusler, 23 Aug. 1799)

Further Reading

Anyone interested in exploring the art of William Blake is welcome to look at the following Web site: <www.blakearchive.org>. To explore the website requires neither membership nor a fee. It’s a spectacular site, which has won numerous awards for its quality, accuracy, technological versatility, and comprehensiveness.

The main part of the archive to explore is the section titled “WORKS IN THE ARCHIVE.” If you do some exploring, you’ll find that some of Blake’s art can be rather scary. That’s because he sometimes worked in two modes: that of gothic horror, which was a fashion of his time (as it is now in the our film industry), and that the sublime, which can be either wonderful at times or frightening, because it deals with overwhelming power or magnitude.