SPIRITUS | 7.1 Spiritus 7 (2007): 30–39 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1970 he spoke of how he imagined speaking to the world when imprisoned in the gulag. In freez-ing darkness he composed speeches in his mind. But when he stood before the great and the good in Stockholm, where all the world would hear him, he said he could only quote his mentor, Dostoyevsky: “Beauty will save the world.”1

Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin says these words in The Idiot. Unfortu-nately Myshkin never explains what he means or describes how this is so. The beauty of Natalia Phillipovna (the novel’s femme fatale) destroys him as well as her and her millionaire lover. Her beauty does not save the world. In Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri (who is passionately in love with Grushenka, another femme fatale) cries that beauty is the ground where God and the Devil contend for human souls. Beauty can inspire destruction and grief.

And it can save. For many years I wanted to find the beauty that saves the world. I wanted

to define it. Then I worked as a social worker in Chicago and one of my proté-gées threw back her head to sing “Amazing Grace” at a birthday party. When she sang grace did fill the room, for Tamika has a voice that is more than amazing. She had been homeless and horribly abused. I took her to breakfast the next day.

“If I couldn’t sing,” she told me, “I’d have to take drugs. Because drugs kill the pain. But beauty is bigger than the pain.”

The beauty that saves the world is in Tamika. The beauty that saves the world is transformative. It is the divine in the

human. It cannot be abstracted from a living being. It is to be experienced, not defined. This beauty does not objectify and it cannot be objectified. It does not set itself apart; it connects each creature with all others in God. The beauty of Dostoyevsky’s Natalia or that of fashion models and film stars may inspire envy and/or desire, but in the beauty of Tamika’s voice or a glorious sunrise or William Blake’s poetry I feel connected to every living thing and can see divine beauty in all that lives. The prophetic poetry of William Blake (especially his Jerusalem) can help us see how this world-saving beauty works.

How Beauty Will Save the World: William Blake’s Prophetic Vision

Susanne Sklar

Sklar | How Beauty Will Save the World: William Blake’s Prophetic Vision

31

Blake’s Work

William Blake (1757–1827), the poet, painter, and engraver, created about fifteen illuminated books, dozens of unpublished poems, and hundreds of paintings and drawings, as well as commercial engravings.2 In his prophetic books he claims to be divinely inspired, taking dictation from Jesus in Jerusa-lem (J4 K622) and seeing with John on Patmos in Milton (40:22 K532) and The Four Zoas (8:600–04 K356).3 He dines with Isaiah and Ezekiel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (12 K153). In his prophetic poems Blake devel-ops a mythopoetic system, often peopled by quasi-angelic characters called Zoas and Emanations. Zoas are generally masculine figures embodying life forces: Blake’s Urizen embodies Reason; his Luvah embodies Love; Urthona or Los is filled with Prophetic Imagination. Emanations are generally feminine characters through which Zoas can interconnect and through which the hu-man can be divine. Blake’s Albion (a man and a land) destroys himself and all the world when he banishes his emanation, Jerusalem, for it is her wisdom and beauty that enables all to be in the body of Christ. Every living creature is part of that great body. All partake of and contribute to divine beauty; the King-dom of God is a glorious song (J99).

Blake’s Beauty

“Exuberance is Beauty!” Blake proclaims in plate 10 of his antinomian Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1791) a plate beginning with the proverb: “The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the Hand & Feet Propor-tion.” Beauty gives life, elementally connecting the human and the divine. The genitals that are Beauty exist in concert with the head, heart, and hands. Blake’s exuberant erotic beauty is not about titillation and possession, but about the transfiguration of humanity, a transfiguration in which readers are invited to participate. Blake’s beauty launches us into what he calls “the Divine Body,” the body of Christ.

In Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), the heroine Oothoon overcomes the agony of rape by a tyrant called Bromion and rejection by The-otormon, the self-absorbed man she loves. She breaks through pain because she is “open to joy and to delight wherever beauty appears.” Her capacity for love and beauty can transform agony. Oothoon is in a love relationship, not merely with the self-absorbed rationalist who rejects her, but also with the beauties of the earth. Her eyes are fixed “in happy copulation” with the lovely morning sun (7:1 K194). She sees that “trees & birds & beasts & men behold eternal joy” (8:8 K195). The man she loves refuses to see that all things inter-relate in divine love, yet she continually calls to awaken him and all earth’s creatures to drink the bliss that comes from seeing that “every thing that lives is holy!” (8:10). The beauty within her inspires forgiveness and peace, as does

SPIRITUS | 7.1

32

the beauty of Jerusalem, the eponymous heroine of Blake’s masterpiece, an il-luminated poem of 100 plates (1804–1820).

Blake’s Jerusalem (“the Emanation”) is filled with the beauty that saves the world. Akin to the beautiful Wisdom loved by Solomon, “a pure emana-tion of the glory of the divine” (Wisd. 10–11), Jerusalem’s embrace inspires the human to become divine. Jerusalem embodies forgiveness and liberty; indeed, she is explicitly called “Liberty” twice in the poem. She participates in suffer-ing, becoming a slave in industrial mills; she is both divine and oppressed, a young bride and a grieving mother. Los, the prophetic blacksmith who furi-ously strives to keep divine vision in troubled times, is stunned by her “ex-treme beauty and perfection” when he can see it (J86:15 K731). Her beauty can transform what can be called evil creatures and souls. When she emanates even “the all wondrous serpent” is “humanized” in “forgiveness of sins” (J98:44–45 K746). When she emanates the energy of war serves creative peace (J98 K744–46). Unfortunately, fallen creatures fear and forbid her beautiful emanation. Fallen creatures want power and control. When Jerusalem pours forth, emanating in the beauty of holiness, hierarchies disintegrate. The beauty of peace threatens notions of power. Jerusalem’s exuberant beauty can create a world in which forgiveness structures societies. But it gets marginalized.

Two Beauties

In Blake’s prophetic books (such as Milton and Jerusalem) the beauty that destroys often overshadows that which saves. Jerusalem, a multifaceted poem, can be seen in terms of the tension between the emanative beauty of Jerusalem and the manipulative beauty of Vala, her shadow. Jerusalem embraces Jesus in naked beauty, calling every creature to participate in the bliss of their marriage bed. She calls all living things to enjoy forgiveness and life. Vala, crowned in gold, adorned with jewels, and wearing fabulous sapphire shoes, is Blake’s femme fatale. Unlike Dostoyevsky’s fatal women, Vala is a cold virgin, us-ing sexual titillation to acquire power and promote war. She wants to destroy Jerusalem and control Albion (called “Universal Humanity” in the poem). This is not a difficult task since Albion wants nothing to do with the beauty of Je-rusalem and the love of Christ. He wants to be exalted over, not connected to, every living thing. In the poem’s first scene he declares: “My mountains are my own and I will keep them to myself . . . Humanity shall be no more, but war & princedom & victory!” (J4:32 K622).

Vala is the “Mother of War” (J50:16 K681). Throughout Jerusalem her shadowy beauty inspires men to kill one another. She loves to see “hearts laid open to the light by the broad grizly sword” (J65:52 K701). She seduces Albion, cooing: “Know me now Albion. look upon me: I alone am Beauty.” She tempts him with her “secret Cave,” a cave he can never enter or possess

Sklar | How Beauty Will Save the World: William Blake’s Prophetic Vision

33

(J33:48–50 K660) according to the dictates of the Moral Law both he and Vala espouse. Albion banishes Jesus and Jerusalem from his heart and en-thrones Vala there. He and his sons crave her deadly beauty. Their cravings create a world based on the ungratified desires of continuous consumption and an economy depleted by what we now call the military industrial complex (J9, 65, K628, 700). Plowshares become swords, little ones die, and the poor barely subsist “upon a crust of bread” (J30:25–32 K656). Albion thinks he controls the earth’s human, aesthetic, and natural riches. Those who do not adhere to his laws of nature and morality are enemies and should be destroyed. Only the strong survive; only the chosen sons of Albion should flourish. As war spreads throughout the earth, raging violently at the Euphrates, Vala smiles and Albion’s warriors worship her (J65–68 K699707). This war culture ultimately destroys Albion—and humanity.

Vala is not condemned in Blake’s poem. Like Albion she is ultimately restored and with him she and all living things participate in the love of Jesus and the peace of Jerusalem. All are finally transfigured in forgiveness of sins. Albion worships Vala’s treacherous beauty because he has a pathological worldview. He has fallen into a state Blake calls Ulro (or Satan) and in Ulro the beauty of Jerusalem and the love of Jesus could only be absurd delusions.

In Ulro, all things must be quantifiable. Ulro is an empirical universe in which everything can be expressed mathematically. Objective reality is the only reality. There are hierarchies and Albion must be at the top of them. Forgive-ness, love, and divine vision cannot be objectified and therefore must not exist. “By demonstration man alone can live and not by faith!” Albion cries when he banishes Jerusalem and Jesus (J4:28 K622). He can neither see nor feel their beauty. Jerusalem tells the story of how Albion finally awakens, moving out of Ulro.

In Blake’s poem called Milton, the movement from Ulro’s mathematical “single vision” to divine wholeness is an aesthetic shift. What Blake calls “Liv-ing Proportion” can encompass “Mathematical proportion” and all (includ-ing the reader) are called to see beauty in every creature. “See thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?” the bard cries to us. “It has a heart like thee, a brain open to heaven and hell . . . Hence thou art clothed with human beauty, O thou mortal” (M20:29–33 K502). In human beauty we are connected to the little winged fly, a grain of sand, a beggar, even a selfish king. In Jerusalem, the human beauty of Jerusalem is divine, transfiguring fallen Albion, materialist Vala, and every living thing.

Spiritual Materialism

In Jerusalem “Vala produc’d the Bodies, Jerusalem gave the souls” (J18:7 K640). In Blake’s Eden (a state of being in which the human is connected to the body of Christ) Vala is incorporated in Jerusalem. As Blake proclaims in

SPIRITUS | 7.1

34

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul” (4 K149). The soul is the ground of the body; the qualitative encompasses the quantitative; rationality is just an as-pect of the divine humanity permeating all things. Rationality, matter, and the quantitative are not degraded by participating in the Divine Body for in that Body there is no hierarchy: there is love. Love is made manifest through what is sensuous. Jesus is found in what Blake calls the “Minute Particulars” of life. A soul without a body cannot participate in that particularity; Jerusalem is disoriented and ineffective when severed from material Vala. Divine beauty cannot be apprehended in or by a disembodied soul (J59–62).

When Jerusalem and Vala are one (J97–99) Jerusalem permeates all things in minute particularity as Christ does in Colossians 1:15–17. All things created in heaven and earth, both angelic and mundane, are uniquely who they are when infused with Jerusalem’s extreme beauty. Each child, each stone, each tree, each English man, each Chinese woman: each is different. In Eden (when all participate in the Divine Body) living creatures are not slotted into racial, economic, social, or political categories, for such generalizations occlude visionary aesthetic perception. Seeing Divine Vision means seeing “in Minute Particulars,” seeing that each creature is a child of the Divine (J91:19–25). Seeing the beauty of each “Minute Particularity” connects embodied souls to Divine Vision and infuses society with the peace and social justice of the King-dom of God.

Jerusalem’s beauty has socio-economic resonance. Her beauty not only illuminates each living being, it also vivifies the commerce between them. Even

Molinos de Viento. © Jorge Tutor

Sklar | How Beauty Will Save the World: William Blake’s Prophetic Vision

35

fallen Albion remembers the Edenic “time of Love,” a time when Jerusalem’s “blessings of gold” brought people of every nation to fair and fruitful trade in “the Exchanges of London” (J24 K647–48). When Jerusalem manages inter-national systems, she teaches ships to sing as goods are exchanged for mutual profit and beauty. Jerusalem’s globalization is essentially aesthetic; her com-merce is a symphony in which each culture’s contribution (Japan, Libya, the Congo, Egypt, France, America, Peru) is necessary to the beauty of its music (J79 K720–21). Harmony is based on difference. The harmonies and phrasings of a great symphony cannot be expressed if the strings are trying to conquer the woodwinds, and the brass section is starving. When Jerusalem emanates no one subsists on crusts. No one is alienated.

In Blake’s unpublished manuscript called The Four Zoas (c.1797) Los (the prophetic blacksmith) finds aesthetic alienation more agonizing than anything economic. He laments: “All things beside the woeful Los enjoy the delights of beauty!” (7:196 K325). Oppressed women, enslaved in Satanic mills, also mourn: “Our beauty is covered over with clay and ashes!” (2:225 K286) When aesthetically alienated Blake’s characters cannot relate to what is divine; they cannot build Jerusalem’s culture of peace, for their imaginations cannot flourish. (I was not surprised when impoverished single mothers in the slums of Tijuana, Mexico told an American foundation that what they most wanted for their undernourished and ill-clad children was a school that was beautiful. Fortunately, James Hubbell, the architect who designed it, is inspired by Wil-liam Blake.) 4

In The Four Zoas, Los and Enitharmon (his female counterpart) trigger the shift from Ulro’s chaos and war to Edenic forgiveness by creating forms of beauty. Los draws new worldviews “upon the shining walls of heaven” and Enitharmon colors his design. The fallen are changed by what they behold, becoming “Embodied and Lovely / In youth & beauty” (FZ.7:468–475 K332). In the context of this beauty the oppressed and wounded can heal, especially Los himself, for when laboring in beauty and finding his enemy “in his hands”: “he wonder’d that he felt love & not hate.” (FZ.7:496–97 K332). Divinely inspired, Los vanquishes vengeance and pain “with the strength of Art” (FZ.7:459 K331).

For Blake, “Art” is a human-divine activity and the human-divine rela-tionship is essentially creative. In his Laocoön, Blake declares: “Prayer is the Study of Art. Praise is the Practise of Art” (K776) and “Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists” (K777). Art is a way of living in and making manifest the beauty of God. Exuberant commitment to divine art strips away the jealousy, fears, and greed occluding participation in the body of Christ. Protective pretenses must be cast away, for “Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed” (K776). This naked beauty does not inspire lust; it invites

SPIRITUS | 7.1

36

each creature to be embraced in divine love. When Albion embraces Vala in Jerusalem’s “time of love” this launches his Emanation, Jerusalem, into the beautiful arms of Jesus which brings Albion and Vala into divine marriage also (J20:32–42). In lovemaking they are transfigured. Love is a form of art; art is a form of love. “Even tree metal earth and stone” (J99) can be transfigured in divine beauty.

Transfiguring Beauty

Christ’s Transfiguration reveals the beauty of God and that beauty is integral to the relationship of the human and the divine.5 Russian icon paint-ers generally begin their training by creating an icon of the Transfiguration for that theophany embodies the spiritual beauty with which they seek to imbue all their work.6 Unfortunately Christ’s Transfiguration is infrequently painted in western art, and only occasionally appears in the stained glass of English church windows. Blake, however, painted two interpretations of the Transfigu-ration, in 1800 and in 1820.

Blake’s first Transfiguration depicts Christ hovering above his stunned disciples as his luminous translucent garment spirals into Elijah and Moses while the golden light around his shining face holds the lightly penciled forms of angels or cherubim (cat.484/pl.545).7 The later painting, The Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditation Among the Tombs” transforms Hervey’s vision of a wrathful and jealous God to a vision of loving forgiveness through Christ’s transfiguration (cat.770/pl.967). Hervey (clearly labeled in the painting) stands (as the viewer does) before an altar and below the judgment of the Lord. The altar contains, not a cross, but Jesus flanked by Elias and Moses, enveloped in the light of transfiguration around which scenes of divine mercy (the ark and the rainbow, the forgiven prodigal, ministering angels, reunited families) constellate. Forgiveness and transfiguration meld, as they do in the epigraph to Jerusalem.

The words “monov o Ievouv”8 (monos o yesus: “alone Jesus” or “only Jesus”) hover above a crescent moon just before Jerusalem’s story about the sleep of Ulro and the awakening to Christ begins (J4). This Greek phrase may allude to both the moment in the Transfiguration when the disciples perceive “Jesus only” (Matt. 17:8, Mark 9:8, Luke 9:36) and to the moment when the accusers of the woman taken in adultery slink away, leaving her alone with Jesus and the forgiveness he embodies (John 8:9). Jerusalem’s fallen characters are transfigured by forgiveness in the poem’s ultimate vision (J96–100 K743–47). When opaque Albion sees Jesus in his friend Los and Los in Jesus, when he sees how Christ gives himself, then he too wants to give himself for others. He throws himself into furnaces of fire which become fountains of living water (J96 K743). He, who is humanity, expands to include all living things and all

Sklar | How Beauty Will Save the World: William Blake’s Prophetic Vision

37

are transformed, growing infinitely translucent as every sense expands in rivers of bliss, animating and participating in the beauty of the Divine Body (J97–98 K74446). Even the cursed serpent is clothed in gold and gems as the beauty of forgiveness overspreads the earth. When all are connected in beauty and in love we are not confined by time and space.

Transfiguration is contagious. You become what you behold, a notion appearing repeatedly in Jerusalem as well as in Blake’s other prophetic works. When Albion beholds and craves material Vala, he (who is humanity) becomes an insatiable consumer. When Albion sees Los in Christ and Christ in Los he enters into divine beauty, rejoicing in amazing grace, and those who behold him are transformed also (J98). This is akin to what happened to Nicholas Motovilov a decade after Jerusalem was written. With his spiritual director, St. Seraphim of Sarov, Motovilov prayed to know the grace of God, to know com-pletely how the Holy Spirit could be in him. Saint Seraphim gripped him and Motovilov cried: “I cannot look at you, the light of your eyes and your face is brighter than the sun!”

Seraphim revealed: “You yourself are shining as I am . . . otherwise you couldn’t see me as you do.”

Motovilov was blinded by radiance, losing all sense of himself in the divine light transfiguring Seraphim and igniting falling snowflakes in the Russian forest.9

In Blake, entering into such light leads to seeing God in all that lives. In “Auguries of Innocence” (1803) he writes:

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 (K434).

Those who dwell in divine light can see human beauty in a lamb, a moth, a la-borer, a prince, a child—for all creatures participate in Christ’s divine human-ity. No one is greater than another and the concept of “enemy” is obsolete. Transfiguring beauty transforms bellicose aesthetics.

The Beauty of Peace

As the Transfiguration precedes Christ’s resurrection in the synoptic Gospels, the descent of the peace of Jerusalem precedes Albion’s awakening in Blake’s masterpiece. (J86 K731). As has been mentioned, Jerusalem’s extreme beauty and perfection dazzle those who behold her. As she emanates, she trans-forms the nature of the “beauty of holiness” celebrated in the Old Testament. She is adorned with a breastplate like Aaron’s and her diadem is engraved like a high priest’s, but the beauty of her holiness does not set her apart. In her beauty, holiness transforms the mundane. Even pots and curtains can be

SPIRITUS | 7.1

38

replete with divine vision (J12, 79, K631, 720). All can dwell in her beauty, di-rectly encountering God. No one is excluded from divine blessing and forgive-ness. What are erroneously called “enemies” can rejoice together.

Jerusalem’s beauty guides “Israel in her tents” to dwell in “Comforting sounds of love and harmony” with “Moab and Ammon and Amalek.” As silver bells ring, Blake’s children of Israel dance with the Canaanites in peace (J86:22–32 K731). Her beauty and her music change assumptions about ter-ritory, inclusion, and wealth. The beauty of this peace is very different from the holy beauty King Jehosaphat worships in 2 Chronicles. There he appoints singers to “praise the beauty of holiness” in order to inspire what we now call genocide. Singers rouse warriors to ruthlessly destroy “the children of Am-mon, Moab, and Mount Seir” (2 Chron. 20:21–25). The Israelite praise singers propagate what Blake would call “Religion Hid in War,” a way of being in which shadowy Vala reigns. Thousands of innocents suffer daily because of “Religion Hid in War.”

Jerusalem’s vivifying beauty brings more joy than Vala’s abstract and untouchable attractions. The beauty of peace can be seen in any living thing. Cultivating that way of seeing promotes forgiveness and participation in the body of Christ. If policy makers saw the beauty of the interconnectedness of all things then the hungry might be fed, the wretched educated, and the oppressed liberated. Beauty is not a thing we possess. Like truth, the beauty of God can set us free.

Notes

1. For an English transcript of Solzhenitsyn’s speech see: http://nobleprize.org/literature/laureates/1970.

2. These can be categorized (or counted) in different ways. 3. All Blake quotations are taken from Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Quotations from Jerusalem are prefaced by “J.” Though David Erdman’s Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake is considered the Authorized Version, I much prefer Keynes, who orders Blake’s works chronologi-cally and uses Blake’s final plate ordering for Jerusalem, a version that makes more dra-matic sense. Keynes also inserts quotation marks whenever a character speaks, which helps readers see the relation between dramatic action and narrative. Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947) is still one of the best basic texts about Blake’s work and vision. G.E. Bentley’s excellent biography, William Blake: Stranger from Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) is also very helpful.

4. For more about James Hubbell’s work see the websites: www.hubbellandhubbell.com and www.americasfoundation.net.

5. For an excellent discussion of the theology of beauty see Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Redondo Beach: Oakwood, 1990). This is also discussed in Michael Quenot, The Icon: Window on the Kingdom (New York: 6 St. Vladimir’s, 1991).

6. See Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon, 299.

Sklar | How Beauty Will Save the World: William Blake’s Prophetic Vision

39

7. See Martin Butlin’s The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (Yale University Press, 1981). This two-volume work includes a catalogue (cat.) and plates (pl.).

8. Blake’s spelling. 9. Nicholas Motovilov, “Conversation on the Holy Spirit,” in Triumphs of the Spirit in

Russia, ed. Donald Nicholl (London: Dartmann, Longman, and Todd, 1997): 51–52.