End Times
by Kenneth Smith
6. Medieval Civilization II
B. Jesus, Christos, Immanuel
The Christian mystic William Blake laid down some of the most auspicious premises for making historical and spiritual sense of Jesus. Blake offers a refreshing and searching mind, true humility and true acuity in one:
...All deities reside in the human breast.—Marriage of Heaven and Hell
God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men.—Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man, as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness.—Marginalia, I
The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God.—Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Ages are all Equal. But Genius is Always Above The Age.—Marginalia, I
Prophets, in the modern sense of the word, have never existed. Jonah was no prophet in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. It is man's fault if God is not able to do him good, for he gives to the just & to the unjust, but the unjust reject his gift....—Marginalia, I
That Jesus is the Son of God is disputable — there is an entire Gospel, Mark, in which he makes no claim to be the Messiah and forbids his disciples to call him such — but what is beyond dispute is that he was a moral genius, a revolutionary in values. Even today the values he laid down keep roiling in spite of everything the organized Church can do to pave them over.
As Blake had the perspicuity to realize, to say of Jesus that he is a moral genius may indeed be the divinely appointed limit of the human condition, the appropriate sense in which Jesus is to be taken as true Man. It is a fallacy to deify him further, for then he ceases to be fully a human. Blake is far subtler and more discriminating than most Christians: he may even be the unrecognized Goethe of Christian Europe, and, like Kierkegaard, the very Scourge of God against a materialist "Christendom." What Blake grasps is ingenious but contrary to all the simplism and absolutism of know-nothing Christians: he sees that God has carried out the work of spiritualizing man over the course of history, by stages and tasks and not once and for all, and not by means of just one unique Individual. Man has to be cultured into spirituality, and cannot attain it at one fell swoop. A famous anecdote about Islam says that to the Moslem, all books other than the Koran either agree with the Koran, and thus are superfluous, or else disagree with it, and thus are heretical. Blake has apparently pondered such a question: if the insights of all geniuses but Jesus were superfluous or misleading, why did God endow them with the authority of genius? At the core of most Christian belief is a tacit egocentrism — a chauvinism and fetishism — which supposes one need not know anything beyond the cloistered circle of one's own subjective feelings and native customs, and a direct line to divine righteousness. Blake rightly sees this is neither humility nor spirituality but idiotism, an incestuous absorption in one's own narrowness. There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus to sanctify such self-celebration and lassitude.
Jesus taught the meaning of spirit in concreto, in contrast to the legalism, ritualism and literalism associated with Judaism.
Do ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him. ...That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders....—Mark 7:18-21
Evil is spiritual, not objective or extravertive: the heart of man, not nature but human moral nature, is the womb of all we ought to detest and be ashamed of. Man's wholeness rests in his own hands, his fall is utterly through his own desires: sin is generated out of our ultimate inward self-activity, our spirit. There is a strong parallel of Jesus' doctrine of personal accountability with the Greek sense of fatalism and daimon: what is of ultimate moral significance we bring upon ourselves, our spiritual fate is equally self-incurred and a matter of the human condition. Sin is a personal liability which our actions and attitudes entail. We cannot disown our intimate accountability for the wrongs we have willed: we do not contract sinfulness like a mindless contagion, Gods and demons from without do not afflict us with it gratuitously. We make ourselves into fertile ground for these seductions. Willing is thus of the essence of how we invoke moral accountability.
The facade of social appearances — who appears respectable and carries out sanctimonious performances in public — was radically discredited by Jesus, as it was by Plato before him (the true test of moral character is shown by the impunity brought on by the ring of Gyges and its shield of invisibility, Republic 359d-361c). But this discreditation of doxa or public opinion was part of the most essential thematic of Greek culture from its earliest centuries, found in the characteristic refrains of pre-Socratic philosophy: what men suppose or claim or profess is relentlessly contrasted with what is true eo ipso or kata physei, in itself or by nature. The characteristic theme of Christian moral truth, as of Hellenic values, consists in inwardness, the naked power of human subjectivity to make self-determined policy for itself as to how it will see things and how it will act. Man coins for himself an authentic or a counterfeit why for his every action; any apparently righteous action can be performed in truth for corruptive reasons that belie its virtue and value. Blake succinctly distilled the precept: As a man is, so he sees. The evil in the world is thus man's doing, something he invoked; and any man should be able to read his own quality of self in the acts and biases he propagates. That most humans cannot evidences the mutual corruption of insight by appetites and appetites by insight.
Man's will is a principle over the moral order: he lives under a regime which is his own activity echoed or mirrored back to him, a relation which the Greeks comprehended as the paradoxical middle voice, the circular or self-reflexive action upon oneself which is at one and the same time active as well as passive. In moral matters, humans are self-victimized by their own vices, and self-elevated by their virtues. Spirit is this remarkable self-begetting, in every case a subtle creation of the quality or mode of world and life one will inhabit. All the remaining centuries of the Christian regime merely spell out the (naturally) extraordinary implications of spirit as an actual or manifest principle demonstrating its authority over man. Theology as complex as particle physics was germinated out of Christian morality, out of the moral psychology of radical self-accountability. Man is morally a principle, a center unto himself, only because he is marked by spirit. Man is not the lord of the world in fact but he establishes the key in which that world will affect him, the rubric of its moral meaning.