The insanity of Blake as co-opted by radical Leftist atheists!

http://socialistreview.org.uk/372/blakes-jerusalem

The above (linked) nonsense is - I judge - typical of the way that William Blake is understood and taught nowadays - in a culture that has so completely and vehemently rejected Blake's mystical Christian metaphysics - and so fully adopted a this-worldly metaphysics of atheism, materialism and socialism - as to render the reality of Blake all-but invisible!

Interestingly, this way of ultra-selectively reading Blake dates back to Jacob 'Ascent of Man' Bronowski's 'Man without a Mask 1944 study. Bronowski was himself a prominent atheist humanist and internationalist communist in politics (at this time of his life, anyway).

What is interesting to me is the way in which metaphysics - that is, a person's fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of reality - functions in a manner identical with insanity; in the sense that the presumptions shape reality to such an extreme extent that a writer who almost continuously talks of Jesus, angels, and the spiritual - who writes again and again of Albion in the most mystical and prophetic fashion, can be seen as primarily a proto-socialist, dedicated to socio-political revolution on the lines approved by modern Leftists!

Blake a revolutionary - Yes, of course! A political revolutionary atheist/ materialist Leftist - of course Not!

As an antidote - here is a long excerpt from Blakes prophetic poem Milton - spoken by the Milton character - prophetically of the horrors of exactly the rationaism, reductionism, and scientism that was s eloquently advocated by Jacob Bronowski (among many - far less eloquent - others!).

Take note, particularly, of his account of the 'idiot Questioner' - who sounds like the typical mainstream modern Establishment politician/ journalist/ professor - close-kin to the author of the Socialist Review article:

      

The negation is the Spectre, the Reasoning Power in Man:
This is a false Body, an Incrustation over my Immortal
Spirit, a Selfhood which must be put off and annihilated alway.
To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by self-examination,
To bathe in the waters of Life, to wash off the Not Human,
I come in Self-annihilation and the grandeur of Inspiration;
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour,
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration,
To cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion’s covering,
To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with Imagination;
To cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration,
That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness
Cast on the Inspirèd by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots
Indefinite or paltry Rhymes, or paltry Harmonies,
Who creeps into State Government like a caterpillar to destroy;
To cast off the idiot Questioner, who is always questioning,
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin
Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave;
Who publishes Doubt and calls it Knowledge; whose Science is Despair,
Whose pretence to knowledge is Envy, whose whole Science is
To destroy the wisdom of ages, to gratify ravenous Envy
That rages round him like a Wolf, day and night, without rest.
He smiles with condescension; he talks of Benevolence and Virtue,
And those who act with Benevolence and Virtue they murder time on time.
These are the destroyers of Jerusalem! these are the murderers
Of Jesus! who deny the Faith and mock at Eternal Life,
Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination
By imitation of Nature’s Images drawn from Remembrance.
These are the Sexual Garments, the Abomination of Desolation,
Hiding the Human Lineaments, as with an Ark and Curtains
Which Jesus rent, and now shall wholly purge away with Fire,
Till Generation is swallow’d up in Regeneration. or ?