Blake and the Methodists

M. Farrell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137455505
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring the work of William Blake within the context of Methodism – the largest 'dissenting' religious group during his lifetime – this book contributes to ongoing critical debates surrounding Blake's religious affinities by suggesting that, contrary to previous thinking, Blake held sympathies with certain aspects of Methodism.

1

Blake and Methodism:
Context and Theory

From the 1730s until the end of the eighteenth century, during what is now known as the Evangelical Revival, Britain possessed an exceptionally wide variety of Dissenting religious groups.¹ In Voltaire’s wry formulation, ‘If there were in England only one religion, despotism would be feared; if there were two they would cut each other’s throats, but there are thirty and they live at peace happily.’² Some believers adhered strictly to the discipline of a single sect; but between many of these groups there was a considerable degree of commonality in terms of their doctrine and spiritual practice, and it was therefore possible for Dissenting Christians at this time to hold eclectic religious views. Such Dissenters could oscillate between religious groups adopting a compound of doctrinal sympathies as they did so.

Believers of this kind were known as spiritual ‘seekers’, meaning that they attended religious meetings without wholly subscribing to membership of any particular denomination. I suggest that Blake was a seeker and, as such, was less unusual in his own era than we have subsequently come to believe. Like many of his contemporaries his theology was syncretic, a hybrid of doctrine and ideology derived from disparate sources.

This context allowed for several types of religious mobility. Francis Okely (1719–94), for instance, roved between different Christian denominations throughout his lifetime and exemplifies the porosity between religious groups during the Revival.³ Influenced by William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Okely was a founder member of the Cambridge Methodists, the counterpart to John Wesley’s Holy Club at Oxford.⁴ This group, also including William Delamotte, embraced the Methodist doctrines of Original Sin, justification by faith alone, and the New Birth; but ultimately came to be disfavoured by the university authorities, as well as their fellow students, and remained an obscure and unpopular coterie, eventually disbanding around 1740. Upon leaving Cambridge, Okely, Delamotte and others were ‘sucked into the vortex of the revival’⁵ which, at this time, was in its neo-natal stages of development. As John Walsh explains,

unlike the birthright Calvinists of the American Great Awakening, they began with no very clear sense of theological identity. While their conversion experiences were vividly real, the theological framework in which they were to be set was not always so self-evident. There was a good deal of theological and organizational confusion before the revival stratified out into more or less clearly defined armies. Many men moved to and fro, seeking more light or a firmer direction. There was re-grouping and changing of sides.⁶

The Anglican Church became the model against which difference was measured. Many Christians seceded from it, including Okely who, like the other Cambridge Methodists, moved more closely towards the Moravian Brethren who had a particularly strong appeal for many spiritual wayfarers during the early years of the Revival.

But Okely increasingly dissociated himself from the Moravians after experimenting for some time with two different versions of heart religion: mystical quietism and itinerant preaching in the manner of Wesley. He opted for the latter, believing this activism, or what he called ‘practical positivism’, to be found wanting amongst the Moravians. In 1758 he accompanied Wesley on a proselytising tour of Ireland. At this time Wesley epitomised for Okely the life of Christian action; but he soon became disheartened, however, once the tour proved to be a limited success. He began to question the spiritual sincerity of many Methodist converts and considered their commitment to a religion of the heart to be partial and weak. After falling out of favour with Wesley, Okely delved further into mysticism and in 1780 published a translation of the Memoirs of the Life of Jacob Behmen. Predominantly influenced by William Law, he became wary of any religion predicated on outward method that distanced the individual from God through the ordinances of worship. Like Law, he assimilated elements from a variety of mystical traditions to assemble his own system of beliefs and, following many years spent in almost complete isolation, he eventually became minister of a Moravian chapel in Northampton and remained so until his death in 1794.⁷

Such oscillation between evangelical activity and mysticism was not uncommon among seekers for there was a good deal of congruence between the two. Both reacted against outward religion, rationalism, and systematic theology and both nurtured in contrast an inward religion of feeling. The evangelicals and mystics were, however, at odds over the doctrine of the Atonement. For the former, the over-emphasis mysticism placed upon the indwelling God meant that Christ’s outward sacrifice became superfluous to the salvation of humankind. The Christ without was the foundation of the Evangelical faith, for he acted as intercessor between the human and the divine worlds, eliding the two. Mysticism could make this element redundant, together with the need for public devotion, the sacraments, and even the holy scriptures. Nonetheless within Wesleyan Methodism there were leanings towards mysticism and it was not uncommon for members to convert to more quietist evangelical denominations, in particular Quakerism. Wesley’s own doctrine of Christian Perfection led many to seek such perfection through self-denial and an intense inward-looking devotion, thereby rendering them susceptible to the lure of mysticism. He even encouraged interest in some mystics, such as Law and Saint Macarius, by publishing editions of their works; and the prefatory life of Macarius mentioned views which Blake – if he read them – would have found sympathetic, such as his statement that ‘thy soul is become all over a spiritual eye’.⁸ But Wesley’s editorial omissions purged these texts of what he perceived to be their doctrinal falsehoods, while his prefaces functioned as a warning to readers against the potential pitfalls of excessive inwardness. Such tactics did not, however, deter all readers from pursuing mysticism. The boundaries between mystical thought and evangelical belief remained, to a significant extent, permeable.

Blake was far from unique in his eclecticism. But whereas Okely moved between religious groups, becoming a member of those groups albeit temporarily, Blake constructed an eclectic theology from a range of sources without ever, it would seem, committing himself to a particular religious persuasion. The best known example of such behaviour is his brief involvement with the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church.⁹

The first New Jerusalem Church was established by Robert Hindmarsh and four other ex-Wesleyan preachers in London on 7 May 1787.¹⁰ These five former Methodists were then baptized as Swedenborgians in an Anglican church on 21 July. The meeting in April 1789 was an attempt to assemble a wider congregation. Hindmarsh was by trade a printer and produced copies of Emanuel Swedenborg’s works including The Last Judgement (1758) and A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell (1784). These books placed an emphasis on faith and feeling in religious matters, proclaiming that all are capable of entering into the spiritual world through faith alone, and that it is possible to unlock the subtext of Scriptures by focusing on their emotional content. There is evidently, then, doctrinal overlap in this instance with Wesley’s religion of the heart and belief in sola fide, and with Evangelicalism more generally; but whereas Swedenborg was greatly influenced by the writings of the mystic Jacob Boehme, as was Blake, Wesley was careful to avoid the quietism of the mystical tradition.

Probably encouraged by his friend the artist John Flaxman, Blake acquired copies of two books by Swedenborg – A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell and The Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love (1788) – and annotated them sympathetically circa 1789. Perhaps Blake’s link with Swedenborgianism was not just Flaxman but also his Methodist contacts? At the very least there is an interesting instance of spiritual seeking here. Blake and his wife, Catherine, attended a preliminary meeting of the New Jerusalem Church in April 1789 and signed a declaration of belief in its fundamental tenets. However, there is no evidence of any further contact with the New Jerusalem Church after this date, and Blake’s attitude towards Swedenborg thereafter was a mixed one. He recommended, for example, the distinctive Swedenborgian canon of the Bible in Jersusalem (E, 196), but annotated a copy of Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Providence with the words ‘Lies & Priestcraft’ and parodied him in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.¹¹ But in Milton, Rintrah and Palamabron describe Swedenborg as ‘strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches’ (E, 117) and the decline of his doctrine into ‘renew[ing] the Trojan Gods/In Albion’ immediately precedes the line referring directly to Whitefield and Wesley. Could Blake in this instance be using Methodism as a corrective to Swedenborgianism? If so, then it would certainly be a curious reversal of the way in which Hindmarsh and his four ex-Wesleyan colleagues moved from Methodism to the New Jerusalem Church.

Blake’s break with the Swedenborg in 1790 did not, however, result in an unequivocal commitment to another denomination. The varieties of religious Dissent during Blake’s lifetime were numerous. Wesley, for instance, noted in his Journal that in the town of Frome in Somerset alone there was ‘a mixture of all opinions – Anabaptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Arians, Antinomians, Moravians, and what not. If any hold to the truth in the midst of all these, surely the power must be of God.’¹² Methodism itself had multiple offshoots: the ‘Welsh Jumpers’, the ‘Primitive Methodists’, the ‘Tent Methodists’, the ‘Magic Methodists’, the ‘Bryanites’ or ‘Bible Christians’, ‘Quaker Methodists’, and ‘Independent Methodists’.¹³ Between these groups there was a considerable degree of mobility that has sometimes been linked to alternating feelings of hope and despair among the working classes in the years following the Revolution. Indeed, at a time of great social and political unrest, many people turned to the saving grace of God for solace. In 1789 Methodism, for example, could claim approximately 60,000 members. By 1800 this number had soared by nearly thirty percent and, by 1810, it had doubled. But as Edward Thompson has argued, such increases in Church membership do not accurately reflect what was in fact a constant vacillation in numbers. ‘Whenever (revolutionary) hope revived’, he writes, ‘religious revivalism was set aside, only to reappear with renewed fervour upon the ruins of political messianism which had been overthrown.’¹⁴ What this points to, then, is the transitory nature of many Methodist conversions, and the contingency of those conversions upon social and historical factors.

At this time, then, Methodism, and by extension Evangelicalism, was not a unified or stable organisation. ‘The first years of the revival were a time of confidence, excitement, tinctured by a good deal of millennial expectation’, Walsh explains, ‘but were also marked by restlessness and experimentation, by separations and schisms, debate and controversy, organizational re-grouping and flux.’¹⁵ This instability and disparity between religious groups meant that spiritual seekers wavered between different denominations, sampling and experimenting with a number of faiths. Mark Knight and Emma Mason have pointed out the diversity of Evangelicalism more generally in this context, noting the difficulty inherent in forging a group identity within such a variegated religious culture:

Evangelicalism crossed denominational boundaries (including those between the Established Church and Dissent), and was marked by its emphasis on Christian beliefs such as the Cross, conversion, and the idea that the Bible was the supreme source of revelation. The permeable and indivisible boundaries made it almost impossible to classify … Outsiders were not alone in struggling to identify Evangelicalism accurately: Evangelicals expended considerable energy in trying to clarify what they were about, and they often answered the question by noting what they were not.¹⁶

Against such a ‘background of London Dissent’, Thompson writes, ‘with its fringe of deists and earnest mystics, William Blake seems no longer the cranky untutored genius that he must seem to those who know only the genteel culture of the time.’¹⁷ But Blake’s specific references to Methodism make it clear that it deserves individual examination. The difficulty, however, is to pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliographical Note
• Introduction
• 1 Blake and Methodism: Context and Theory
• 2 The Moravians
• 3 Blake, Wesley, and Theology
• 4 Literary Culture
• 5 Hymnody
• 6 Night Thoughts
• 7 Blake, Wesley, and Milton
• 8 The New Birth
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index