Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

contains a thousand copies of the same perfect book. And VictorHugo would say later that the world had to be imperfect, because if it were perfect, it would be mistaken for God—the light would be lost in the light.
    These examples seem false to me. Because it is one thing that in a painting there are dark areas, that in a library there are imperfect books, and it is quite another that in the soul of a man there have to be such books and such colors. And Blake sensed this problem. Blake wanted to believe in an all-powerful and benevolent God. At the same time, he felt that in this world, in a single day of our lives, there are events that we would have wished had gone differently. So, perhaps under the influence ofSwedenborg, or maybe some other influences, he finds a solution. The Gnostics—philosophers in the first centuries after Christ—came up with this solution. According to the explanation of the system given by Irenaeus, they imagined a first God. 6 That God was perfect, immutable, and from that God emanate seven gods, and those seven gods correspond to the seven planets—the sun and the moon were considered planets at that time—and they allow seven other gods to emanate from them. In this way, there rises a high tower with 365 floors. (This corresponds to the days of the year.) Each instance, each one of those conclaves of gods, is less divine that the previous, and so on the bottom floor, the fraction of their divinity is close to zero. And it is the god on the floor below floor 365 that created the earth. And that is why there is so much imperfection on earth: it was created by a god who is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, and so on, of all the higher gods.
    Now Blake, through his entire oeuvre, distinguishes between the Creator God, who would be Jehovah from the Old Testament—the one who appears in the first chapters of the Pentateuch, in Genesis—and a much higher god. In this case, according to Blake, the earth would have been created by an inferior god, and this is the god who gives the ten commandments, moral law; and then a much higher god sends Jesus Christ to redeem us. That is, Blake creates an opposition between the Old Testament and the New Testament whereby the god who created the world is the one who imposes moral law—that is, restrictions, the idea that you should not do this, or not do that. Then Christ comes to save us from those laws.
    Historically, this is not true, but Blake stated that this is what the angels and demons revealed to him in special revelations. He said that he had conversed with them many times as had the Swedish Emmanuel Swedenborg, who also died in London and who also conversed frequently with demons and angels. Now, Blake arrives at the theory that this world—the work of an inferior god—is an hallucination, that we are being deceived by our senses. Previously it had been stated that our senses are imperfect instruments. For example,Berkeley already pointed out that if we see a distant object, we see it as small. We can touch a tower or the moon with our hand. Nor do we see the infinitely small, nor do we hear what is said far away. We could add that if I touch this table, for example, I feel it as smooth; but all it would take is a microscope to show me that this table is rough, uneven, that in reality, it consists of a series of ridges, and as science has shown, a jumble of atoms and electrons.
    But Blake went further. Blake believed that our senses deceive us. There is a poem by an English poet who died during the First World War, [Rupert]Brooke, where this idea is expressed quite beautifully, and it can help you if you remember it. He says that when we have left our bodies behind, when we become pure spirit, then we can really touch: “
ya que no tendremos manos para tocar, y veríamos, no ya cegados por nuestros ojos
”: “And touch who have no longer hands to feel / And see no longer blinded by our eyes.” 7 And Blake said that if we could cleanse our “doors of perception”—a phrase used byHuxley in a book about mescaline that was recently published—we would see things as they are, as infinite. 8 That is, we are now living in some kind of dream, an hallucination that has been imposed on us by Jehovah, the inferior god who created the earth, and Blake wondered if what we see as birds—a bird cutting through the air in flight—is not really a delightful universe hidden to us by our five senses. Now, Blake writes againstPlato,