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Did Jesus Go To England? An Attack on Classicism by a Classicist (William Blake and Longing)

Did Jesus Go To England? An Attack on Classicism by a Classicist (William Blake and Longing)

Last updated on: September 23, 2018 at 11:51 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Did Jesus Go To England? An Attack on Classicism by a Classicist (William Blake and Longing) 2018-09-23T23:51:24-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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William Blake, half mad half damned, wrote beauty that lifted his soul from Hell to God.

Picture William Blake, a man who hates his times with all his heart and despises his own limitations. The old order was changing and giving way to a new and what was old was better and the new was corrupt: utterly. Blake went mad considering all this and chose pathways that put his soul in peril, but he kept looking Godward.

This may have saved him and in his depression he saw some truth. We should hear that truth so we do not have to follow his path to learn what he learned.

Blake saw something true. A weird classicism can strangle what is good, true, and beautiful in a local people. The powerful works of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil can keep us from our own local roots. In a Christian commonwealth, we must not only look to Pagan Rome. God knows I love the wisdom of Plato, but it must not prevent me from hearing the truth of Langston Hughes or give me an excuse to keep away from the depths of Jonathan Edwards.

I am n0t an Ancient Greek, but an American and America needs her sons and daughters to look to her own writings to wallow in Lincoln and respect (God help me!) Melville and O’Connor.

There is something Blake also saw: Christendom must not so exalt pagan writers that she forgets her true sons. He wrote a long (and difficult) piece on Milton, the great English epic poet. He saw that Christians should not ignore Christian writers out of a back-of-the-bus mentality. This is the folly that says “Christian music” is bad and forgets Bach was a Christian. We must be ourselves and not just ape other ways.

Of course, if you grew up (as I did not) in a Christian culture where only Christian and American writers were ok, where David Barton was your Thucydides, then this seems strange to you. Americanism, jingoism, is an error. We must plunge to the depths of classical culture, Plato counts, and then explore cultures that are less directly related to the formation of our language and culture. If we are Christians, Ethiopia, Armenia, and Georgia are our great-aunts, wise and true. Study them.

Having learned we can read Homer (yes!) and study Plato (more please!), and we should, we must not let this turn into the other error. That is what Blake saw. A dead classicism was allowing the Newtonians, the mechanical man who would set up the Gradgrind Schools that Dickens saw coming in Hard Times, to destroy England. Against this the classicists of Oxford and Cambridge too often proffered pagan writers not rooted in England.

Tolkien understood this when he crafted Lord of the Rings. He was a saner Blake who created an English myth. Here is Blake on the problem:

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato & Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn: are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible. but when the New Age is at leisure to Pronounce: all will be set right: & those Grand Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly Inspired Men, will hold their proper rank, & the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakspeare & Milton were both curbd by the general malady & infection from the 10 silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword. Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fash[i]onable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. 20 We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord.

Jesus! King Jesus is the key: our salvation. Blake saw a problem, the same that Latter Day Saint Joseph Smith saw. Jesus had come to Palestine and not to England or America. What could make sacred the Lake District or the Rockies? Where was the incarnate son of God?

The Latter Day Saints gave us the Book of Mormon. Blake the dream that Jesus came to Glastonbury and grew up in England.

The first time I read the entire Book of Mormon, I knew the power of that text. Joseph Smith dared to make America a Holy Land. Blake would ask: “And did those feet in Ancient Times, walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pasture seen?”

No.

That is the problem. The Book of Mormon and Blake sacramentalized North American and England by making a great myth: Jesus in North America, Jesus in England.

I get this, the power of it. Jesus was here.

But He was not.

Or was He?

I think He was. God was here in the Image of God found in each person in the First Nations that lived here before Columbus. God was in England when a Celt saw the glory of God in the Heavens that declare His Glory. Blake’s mistake was to long so much for English Christianity, English Jesus, that he lost Jesus.

Jesus came to Palestine in space and time, but then went to God. Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus comes to any person who asks. When our feet walk in Houston, we are Jesus here and now.

God is here. We do not need to pretend: England and North America, India and Nigeria, can be a Holy Land if we will not cease from mental fight or let the sword rest in our hand. We can build Jerusalem here on Houston’s humid and swampy land.

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