Blake List — Volume 1995 : Issue 4

Today's Topics: Re: THOMAS J.J. ALTIZER ON BLAKE? Blake Sightings Re: THOMAS J.J. ALTIZER ON BLAKE? Kenosis Re: Kenosis Re: Kenosis Re: Kenosis Re: Kenosis Re: Kenosis Re: Kenosis ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 23:37:26 -0400 From: RobertsonG@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: THOMAS J.J. ALTIZER ON BLAKE? Message-Id: <950722233724_120848352@aol.com> This is rather strange, I just bought his book second hand and read it last week. I found it a very important Blake book, somewhat of the emotional/spiritual flip side to Thompsons book. Both share the same common point of view that the critic must be brave and face the fact that Blake is a religious artist - Atzler says he is unblushingly a prophet. Atzler touches on the key point, I think, for the next decade or two of scholarship: how does one handle the death of the Romantic? Hegal is scary, especially if seen through the lense of Nietzche and later Foucault types. Atzler's theme is that it is the religious which will count, replacing the Romantic, and it is religion that is accesible, the religion of "God is dead" and yet alive in man's imagination and thought. Naturally this brings us to Blake as the champion of the divinity of man. In anycase, we will need something soon to counter either the passion of nationalism or the nihilist. And as i speak I am looking at a fantastic WEB site "http://www.aa.net/"urizen/pageart/blake, in particular, as if illustrating this letter - "The Web of Religion" by Blake. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 18:38:35 -0500 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake Sightings Message-Id: <95072418383496@womenscol.stephens.edu> Two recent Blake allusions might stimulate a variety of feelings, depending upon political orientation. In Michael Lind's review of Speaker Newt's new book, in the *New York Times Book Review", he says "'To Renew America' should be subtitled 'Songs of Innocence and Experience.'" This is neither flattering to the Speaker nor indicative of deep understanding of Blake on Lind's part, since he goes on to characterize Gingrich's political philosophy as based in "sentimentality about childhood"; Blake was many things, but not sentimental. The other comment is by Katha Pollitt, columnist for *The Nation* but this published in *Mother Jones* and reprinted in *Civilization*: Blake's poems "are still for me the most important statement about wealth and poverty, cruelty, the evil of authoritarian religion, and the way an unjust society maintains itself by what he calls 'the mind-forg'd manacles'--the ways in which you make your own prison and your prison makes you." ON the whole, Pollitt's testimonial seems more welcome, unless one subscribes to the principle that any publicity is good, whether favorable or unfavorable. Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) persisting in my folly ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 20:04:43 -0400 (EDT) From: Jonathan J Winsor To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: THOMAS J.J. ALTIZER ON BLAKE? Mr. Smith said in his post on Altizer that kenosis is a Christian atheist idea. Going back to my Merton interests that I was posting about a while ago, recently I was reading _Ace of Freedoms: Thomas Merton's Christ_ by George Kilcourse and this book is filled with discussions about Merton's "kenotic christology." This seems to be the main buzzword of the book. I'm not sure I understand the meaning of this term, even after looking it up in various encyclopedias. Anyway, I also wanted to post again that Merton wrote an essay on Altizer (the first essay in Merton's _Literary Essays_.) Merton seemed to take him seriously, but had some things to say about the "most"s and "only"s that fill Altizer's Blake discussion. Merton challenges Altizer's assumtions about the "only"-ness of Blake's thought by bringing up some of his own long, eclectic list of authors he had been exploring. --Jon Winsor. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Jul 95 15:27:29 EDT From: Kevin Lewis To: BLAKE@albion.com Subject: Kenosis Message-Id: <9507251935.AA13242@uu6.psi.com> Kenosis: self-emptying This is a term with a long history in Christian theology. A kenotic Christ is a Christ who gives himself to the world; the godhead in him is giving and emptying itself into and for the Creation. To term this "atheistic" is to label in haste a concept and term which Christian theologians have rather obviously found congenial. (The word I keep seeing in Altizer's writings is "reversal" -- he's in favor of reversals, as many as possible apparently. Blake as an "atheist" would be an example. So this makes him fun to read! Well.....) To repeat: Altizer told me once that A.L. Morton (_The Everlasting Gospel_) showed him what direction to take when he wrote that early book about Blake. Kevin Lewis ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 16:18:09 -0500 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Kenosis Message-Id: <95072516180949@womenscol.stephens.edu> Correct me if I am wrong, but is not the kenotic concept of the Incarnation the exact opposite of the Muggletonian notion described by Thompson (see esp. 77-79), which asserted that God, indivisible, "'transmuted' himself into the infant Jesus in Mary's womb," so that "there could then be no God in heaven or in any other part of the cosmos--Christ, the man, was not only divine, he was the only God." In the kenotic version, Jesus "emptied" himself of the godhead in order to become human, leaving God in heaven to announce his pleasure in his son at the time of John the Baptist's baptism. The two views clearly involve completely different notions of theophany. I realize that this is probably a simplistic version of the difference--correct me if I am way off base. Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) persisting in my folly ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 22:28:43 -0400 From: RobertsonG@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Kenosis Message-Id: <950725222129_122989351@aol.com> I think you are right - it is the opposite of the Muggletonian concepts as I understand it. The point I was making is the tremondous improvement and quality of debate when looks at Blake with out embarrassment as a theological issue, rather than trying to plug him into the current ages pop pyschology or critical chic methodology. To see Balke as a religious artist perhaps makes him less interesting, but it puts him in the proper important placement. The importance is that Thompson and Altizer start from a religious point of view. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Jul 95 22:40:32 EDT From: Kevin Lewis To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Kenosis Message-Id: <9507260300.AA15147@uu6.psi.com> On Tue, 25 Jul 1995 16:18:09 -0500 said: >Correct me if I am wrong, but is not the kenotic concept of the >Incarnation the exact opposite of the Muggletonian notion described >by Thompson (see esp. 77-79), which asserted that God, indivisible, > >"'transmuted' himself into the infant Jesus in Mary's womb," so that >"there could then be no God in heaven or in any other part of the >cosmos--Christ, the man, was not only divine, he was the only >God." In the kenotic version, Jesus "emptied" himself of the >godhead in order to become human, leaving God in heaven to >announce his pleasure in his son at the time of John the Baptist's >baptism. The two views clearly involve completely different >notions of theophany. I realize that this is probably a simplistic >version of the difference--correct me if I am way off base. >Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) persisting in >my folly > I think you are basically, and not too simplistically, right, Tom. That passage from Thompson is correct about the Muggletonian notion of God leaving heaven to become Jesus (leaving heaven, six miles high, vacant of divinity, in the process). But since I have not read the Thompson yet--to my shame, by the way, for I agreed to write a brief book note on it for one of my professional society journals over half a year ago--I don't know what application Thompson may be making to the more complicated, more sophisticated case of Blake. Myself, I don't think Blake adopts or even adapts this Muggletonian, unkenotic Jesus. Is it not a *spiritual* Jesus we keep hearing about in Blake? Ant-Trinitarian, humanistic, artful, and if in some sense "God" (cf. the Laocoon annotations) still not the common sense/plain-spoken God of the Muggletonians, who did indeed treat the Old and the New Testaments as revealed Word: component elements in the Third Commission rather than scripture to be revisioned if not superceded freely by each and every new artist Christian. Was it Methodists with their warm and friendly Jesus-as-a-friend who influenced Blake more than the Muggletonians, at least when it comes to his Jesus (eternally busting through the zones of death and hell to teach the lesson, whatever it is, dramatized on plate 96 of _Jerusalem_)? I'm still mulling that earlier discussion we had, sorry. Kevin Lewis (likewise persisting...) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 09:25:16 -0400 (EDT) From: "Michelle L. Gompf" To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Kenosis Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII The question of which religious beliefs influenced Blake more is one that seems to me both very important and also impossible to answer with complete confidence. I've been trying to place Blake in an historical, and more recently religious context. (Reading Thompson, Mee etc.) What I found interesting in Thompson's book is that, while arguing strongly for a Muggleton influence, he does not try to pigeon-hole Blake into one religious sect, but instead reads him, as Mee does, as a bricoleur. (and as I see it, more human, how many people really believe whole heartedly with one particular sects beleifs and don't incorporate their own interpretations or outside influences?) Anyway, I too beleive it is important to see Blake in a religious context, I'm not sure about as a religious poet, I see him more as a social poet -- but can you divide the two? Sorry to go on, I'm finding creative ways to put off work I should be doing. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 12:52:58 -0500 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Kenosis Message-Id: <95072612525837@womenscol.stephens.edu> My brief reference to Thompson did not include the qualification that he does not suggest that Blake adopted the Muggletonian view--quite the contrary, he suggests only that "the Muggletonian Church preserved a vocabulary of symbolism, a whole cluster of signs and images, which recur--but in new form and organisation, an din asociation with others-- in Blake's poetry and painting. I will go further: of all the traditions touched upon, I know of none which consistently transmits so large a cluster of Blakean symbols" (91), and he goes on to argue that the Muggletonian symbols are less important influences than the effect on the structure of Blake's thought. But earlier he had said, (with reference to the "two seeds" theory among Muggletonians) that "as always, Blake does not *follow* doctrune but turns it to his own account" (77). It's an interesting question whether Blake in his time or we in our own would want to take seriously the notion that "religion" would in some way repair the ravages or fill the vacuum left by ideologies, nationalisms, or capitalisms. A hefty dose of Blake would surely help in all such areas, but not as "religion" it seems to me. We see enough of that at work in Bosnia (to mention only a distant tragedy). Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) persisting in my folly ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Jul 95 12:47:27 CDT From: Mark Trevor Smith To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Kenosis Message-Id: <9507271758.AA04479@uu6.psi.com> In response to tomdill, quoted below, I do not see that the two definitions are completely different. In both Altizer's kenosis and Thompson's Muggletonian incarnation, the death of God occurs as God becomes completely man and man becomes completely God. Tomdill quotes Thompson: "there could then be no God in heaven." In the same sentence--in a part that tomdill does not quote--Thompson continues, "It followed also that between the crucifixion and the resurrection there was no God either in heaven or on earth: God had been killed." This stark overstatement of the meaning of the crucifixion is compatible with Altizer's extreme formulations. "the full meaning of the Incarnation is a dual and dialectical process whereby God empties Himself of Himself and becomes man and man empties himself of his historical particularity and his individual selfhood and becomes God: 'Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.'... Spirit _is_ this eternal movement of absolute self-negation" (Altizer 74-75). Thus both Altizer and Thompson try to explain the difficult and strenuous relation between human and divine, A thru Hegel and T thru Muggletonianism. Both elevate the human to the status of the divine and vice versa. -- Mark mts231f@vma.smsu.edu Mark Trevor Smith On Tue, 25 Jul 1995 16:18:09 -0500 said: >Correct me if I am wrong, but is not the kenotic concept of the >Incarnation the exact opposite of the Muggletonian notion described >by Thompson (see esp. 77-79), which asserted that God, indivisible, > >"'transmuted' himself into the infant Jesus in Mary's womb," so that >"there could then be no God in heaven or in any other part of the >cosmos--Christ, the man, was not only divine, he was the only >God." In the kenotic version, Jesus "emptied" himself of the >godhead in order to become human, leaving God in heaven to >announce his pleasure in his son at the time of John the Baptist's >baptism. The two views clearly involve completely different >notions of theophany. I realize that this is probably a simplistic >version of the difference--correct me if I am way off base. >Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) persisting in >my folly > -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1995 Issue #4 ************************************