Common Knowledge

Kripal, Jeffrey John, 1962-
Reality against Society: William Blake, Antinomianism, and the American Counterculture
Common Knowledge - Volume 13, Issue 1, Winter 2007, pp. 98-112

Duke University Press

Jeffrey John Kripal - Reality against Society: William Blake, Antinomianism, and the American Counterculture - Common Knowledge 13:1 Common Knowledge 13.1 (2007) 98-112 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reality against Society William Blake, Antinomianism, and the American Counterculture Jeffrey J. Kripal His Seventy Disciples sent Against Religion & Government --William Blake, on the mission of Christ William Blake (1757-1827) made a brief appearance in an earlier essay of mine for Common Knowledge titled "Comparative Mystics." There are many reasons to reinvoke this poet and artist for the present symposium on the historical, moral, and social importance of antisocial personalities. To begin with, Blake was just such a character. He was a deeply eccentric, marginal, and relatively unknown figure. His later and still growing fame could not have been guessed from his reputation in his own time. Some of his contemporaries considered him "an absolute lunatic," "a saint amongst the infidels & a heretic with the orthodox." Blake was a man who "said many things tending to the corruption of Xtian morals" and who "outraged all common sense & rationality." The charge of madness was a common one in his own day and can still be heard occasionally in ours, even as an industry of elite scholarship sifts through and debates every detail of his personal mythology and largely hidden life. If Blake was once a relative nobody of very humble means, he is now ...