The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary

3 Blake and the Devil’s Party

63 s Blake anD The Devil’s PaRTy 3 Let us send to the aid of our honesty whatever we have of devilry in us. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Energy and Opposition The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the most exuberant, swaggering , and exhilarating of all Blake’s works. It was written in or very shortly after 1790, in that apparent dawn of liberty of which Wordsworth wrote that it was bliss to be alive, when the revolution in France still promised to bring in a New Jerusalem on earth. The liberty which Blake proclaims and celebrates is not political only, although it certainly includes the political. It is liberation of the energies of life. Those energies are to be liberated from all doctrines which impose a moralizing division between good and evil on the wholeness of human being. Such doctrines have usurped the powers of reason, claiming for it a false dominion over the energies of the psyche, whose contours reason should rather trace, without seeking to control. Instead, this moralizing reason has misrepresented those energies as evil—has demonized them as the energies of hell. What could be more fitting, then, than for Blake to challenge this false doctrine by giving the Devil a voice, and allowing that voice to merge with his own? 64 The Devil as Muse s THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors: 1. That man has two real existing principles, viz, a Body and a Soul. 2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the body, and the Reason, called Good, is alone from the soul. 3. That God will torment man in Eternity for following his energies. But the following Contraries to these are true: 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life and is from the body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is eternal delight. Blake then moves to overturn the story which has given us the Devil as the fallen force of evil, in a lightning analysis that brings theology, psychology, and politics brilliantly together: Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. And being restrained it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, and the governor (or reason ) is called Messiah. And the original archangel, or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is called the Devil or Satan, and his children are called Sin and Death. But in the Book of Job Milton’s Messiah is called Satan. For this history has been adopted by both parties. It indeed appeared to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devil’s account is that the Messiah fell, and formed a heaven of what he stole from the abyss.1 The Bible itself is wiser than the story that has been derived from it. In the book of Job, the reason that presumes to sit in moral judgment, and s Blake and the Devil’s Party 65 bring accusations of sin or incipient sin against Job, is called Satan and correctly identified as the enemy of man. Blake here invokes what I have been calling the Bible’s secret history of the Devil, which recognizes an element of collusion between Satan and God, and inflects this for his own purposes: what links the Satan of Job with the God of Christian tradition, and with Milton’s Messiah who drives Satan and his angels out of heaven, is their presumption of righteousness. This emanates merely from their weakness in energetic desire, which is the only life. When Milton transmitted the traditional story from the orthodox point of view, he duly elevated such righteousness as deity, and denigrated the energies of desire as fallen into hell. But Milton was also a great poet. The poetic imagination, for Blake, is always the expression of energy. The poetry of Paradise Lost therefore refutes the story that it tells: Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God, and at liberty when of devils...