Review IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST Peter Lumsden Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, by E P Thompson, Cambridge University Press, hardback, £17.95 Blake conforms so satisfactorily to our stereotype of the mad poet that we are tempted to leave well alone, admire his work, but feel that the man and his thought are best left in decent obscurity. We value our comfort in SoF - the courteous debate, the famous C of E charm - and may well feel that so emotional, bizarre and partisan a figure as William Blake is best examined at arm's length, if at all. But to a discontented minority amongst us he may be just what we need.
Most of SoF seems to me to divide into two groups. The first is happy to explore religion as a human creation somewhat in the manner of an evening class in anthropology, and is motivated by intellectual curiosity. Nothing wrong in that, of course. The second group are church members and church-goers, or would be if a non-realist faith was acceptable to their respective churches. Their position is very similar to that of the homosexuals: they want to come out of the non-realist closet and then would be happy to participate fully in existing church life. They may change their denomination or religion to a less intolerant one which can accommodate a non-realist faith. Again, a laudable objective.
But for the rest of us - the awkward squad - E P Thompson's Blake might be just what we are looking for. I don't know whether Thompson [who died before this book was published] knew of our existence, or would have cared, for he, like Blake, was driven by the vision of the Kingdom, which has hardly been our first concern. So this book might only be of interest to those for whom the Kingdom is the measure of all things. We are those who feel that the only part of our history we can take any pride in is the tradition of dissent which kept the vision alive, and we would want SoF to work for what John Robinson called the New Reformation.
But if establishing the Kingdom - peace on earth - is really our first concern, we need to be clear about the sacrifice and commitment required. To misquote Peguy, the love of humanity is a harsh and dreadful love. Poverty and persecution were Blake's lot, and the peace movement of which E P Thompson was an active member knows this at first hand. So what can SoF deliver that the peace movement cannot? Blake, I think, would see our unique status within the Christian establishment - within the Belly of the Beast, as he might put it - as ideally placing us to carry on that mental fight to overthrow Satan. He would urge us on as a fifth column to undermine the supremacy of Christianity, which - legitimising Western capitalism - is responsible for devastating humanity and the globe.
Basic to the SoF position is that Christianity has no privileged status; it is simply one religion amongst many. And if this is so, then the West's privileged status in the world is not God-given but has been brought about by violence. For the West, the death of God would bring about the death of Western hegemony. If, for the third world to live the first must die, then SoF is well placed to bring about the suicide of the Great Satan - as our Muslim brothers deservedly call our way of life. SoF can become the basis for a liberation theology for the first world and might enable us to give up our affluence and work towards a just social order.
Not of course that all this can be read straight off from Blake - quite the reverse. He is a figure very different from us, almost medieval at times. His nearest modern equivalent might be Simone Weil, the enigmatic French anarchist. Like her he was an idealist in both senses of the word. We are cut off from him by the wasteland of the scientific world-view. His contemporaries Paine and Locke belong to our world but he does not. For him the earth still showed forth the Glory of the Lord and philosophy had yet to unweave a rainbow. He knew humanity had the power to create heaven on earth but knew this would be a work of art, of the Imagination, not of reason.
Blake's attack on reason instantly gets our backs up because now we all see it as the essence of being human. But I think that it is because we simply cannot conceive of love as being the basis of human society that we settle for reason as a viable second-best. It is because reason has given us such mastery over nature that we think it must therefore be the basis of mastery over ourselves. "Rational" political argument starts with the assumption of self-interest and, as the old joke has it, if you want to get to the Kingdom of Heaven you can't start from here. Blake would have agreed with Hume that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions - though unfortunately Hume's passion was for backgammon. Kierkegaard's "subjectivity is truth" captures his essence. Both in the establishment of his day, dominated by Newton and Locke, and in the revolutionary camp of Paine and Godwin, reason held sway, and the outcome of both traditions, modern capitalism and modern communism respectively, needs no comment from me.
Blake is to be understood as an artist or not at all. If you are looking to him for a theory of revolution then you are part of the problem. His revolutionary anarcho-pacifism is at once wildly unreasonable and - being the Path of Love - the only way to the Kingdom. Only in tiny, derided and marginalised groups - Mennonites, Amish Hutterites - is love exalted over reason, and the vision of the Kingdom lives on. They offer the only hope for the future.
Amongst such groups are E P Thompson's great love, the Muggletonians: "I like these Muggletonians, but it is clear that they were not among history's winners. Nor did they wish to be. It was their business to preserve and hand down the divine vision" (p90). The most moving passages in the book describe his encounter with the last living member of the sect and his rescue of their archives from oblivion. It was the last act in a long relationship. He declared his commitment to them to a "startled" audience in 1968 at Columbia University. This gives a valedictory colouring to the book, which is meaningful for us as well, as it was his last work.
Two Muggletonian doctrines shared by Blake - and the tenacity with which they kept their faith alive for three hundred years - arouse Thompson's admiration. These are antinomianism and kenoticism, though neither Thompson nor Blake describe it as such. (My warranty for so doing comes from Thomas J J Altizer, one of the "Death of God" group of theologians). Antinomianism (literally against the law) derives from St Paul's strictures against Jewish ritual observances, but had come to mean in Blake's day the primacy of conscience or personal moral choice over against the authority of church or state or - and this is where it differs from mainstream Protestantism - scripture. Love was held to abrogate even scripture.
This doctrine gained currency in the glorious religious free-for-all following the Civil Wars. Thompson describes it thus: "The point now is that the zealous life of theological private enterprise which was thrown open by the English Civil Wars allowed hundreds of humble experiments in doctrine to fashion eclectic systems, now drawing upon Calvin and now upon Luther, now upon Joachim of Fiore and now upon Boehme". It also deified the authority of reason and would find its present justification in the philosophical doctrine of the naturalistic fallacy and in situation ethics, and - I imagine - would offer few difficulties to most members of SoF. Kenoticism - which is derived from Philippians 2, vi-viii, and which holds that the Incarnation is total and irrevocable, is, I feel, a much more significant doctrine for us in two ways. Firstly, its proclamation that God became wholly human in the Incarnation transcends the division between realism and non-realism and would enable any future SoF eucharist to draw on the rich store of Blakean and Nietzschean imagery.
Like the heroine of Olive Schreiner's novel, Blake loved Jesus and hated God, but never expressed this in any consistent way. "I will not reason or compare, my business is to create", he said. Thompson comments: "But a contradiction in thought, which derives from an acute tension of contrasting values, neither of which can be abandoned, can be wholly creative. If we will neither deny Christ's divinity, nor elevate it above that of mortal creation which shares in the same divine essence, then we have an intense and mystical humanism. If God exists in Man and nowhere else, then the whole cosmic conflict between darkness and light, things corporeal and spiritual, must be enacted within oneself and one's fellow men and nowhere else" (p159). At times one can see that Blake foreshadows Feuerbach in seeing that the traditional image of God draws all vitality and authenticity from humanity. It may well be the ideological grandparent of Marx's concept of alienation.
Secondly, it provides the most powerful single image in the liberation theology for our own culture which I mentioned earlier. Just as the Exodus provides the basic meaning for third world liberation theology, so that passage from Philippians shows us what we must do. We are the Creator of the modern world; Western financial institutions have enslaved humanity and we must follow the Divine example in a voluntary surrender of power. The most effective and practical way of initiating this process is through ethical consumerism and investment. The celebration of the death of God in a future SoF eucharist would be the celebration of the death of our way of life, and only such a death will bring about the resurrection of a just social order.
So my reply to Don Cupitt and Clive Richards is that SoF can deliver, but it needs to find its roots in radical dissent, Blake and the peace movement. A salutary warning can be read off from the fate of a predecessor, the late 'sixties Death of God movement in the USA. In its short life it achieved far more media attention than SoF, making the front cover of Time magazine. But because it was very much an affair of the head and not of the heart, and made no attempt to build Jerusalem in America's green and pleasant land, it vanished without trace.
To me, SoF is more significant than the peace movement on which I spent my youth and inheritance because it offers a chance to lance the boil - to nail the lie - that lies at the heart of our way of life. It can put down the tyranny of market forces and return a truly repentant and wholly humanistic Christianity to the heart of our existence, and all can see the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Peter Lumsden is a care worker in local government social services in Camden and a member of the SoF Steering committee. "GOD, PLEASE MAKE IT SNOW!" Derek Chorley When I was a child, I thought as a child - St Paul When I threw a ball in the air and it came down again into my waiting hands, I didn't know why it came down, it just did and it was magical. I knew the trees. They were my friends, I didn't know their names but I did know their characteristics. This one had springy branches from which I could make a fine bow. This bush had strong straight branches from which I could make arrows. I knew the shapes of the leaves, the patterns of their veins, the smell of them when you crushed them. I used to look under the curled leaves to see if there was a fluffy ball concealing a spider. I looked in the hedgerows for nests, and what joy when they contained eggs! I knew which bird had laid them. I loved to run my hands over trees with rough bark and feel the smoothness of others. I climbed the trees as high as I dared and enjoyed the slightly giddy feeling of being above the world. It was exhilarating to hide high up in the branches and watch people underneath pass by, unaware of my presence.