Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

even though Blake is profoundly Platonic, for Blake believes that the true universe is inside ourselves. You have probably read that Plato said that to learn is to remember, that we already know everything. AndBacon added that not knowing is having forgotten, which becomes the obverse of the Platonic doctrine.
    So, for Blake there are two worlds. One, the eternal one—paradise—is the world of the creative imagination. The other is the world in which we live, deceived by the hallucinations imposed on us by our five senses. And Blake calls this universe “the vegetable universe.” Here, we can see the enormous difference between Blake and the romantics, because the romantics felt reverence for the universe. In a poem, Wordsworth speaks of a divinity “whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns, the round ocean and the living air,” “
una divinidad cuya morada es la luz de los soles ponientes y el Redondo océano y el aire viviente
.” 9 Whereas all this was abhorrent to Blake. Blake said that if he watched the sunrise, what he was really seeing was a kind of silver coin rising in the sky. If, however, he saw or thought of the dawn with his spiritual eyes, then he saw hosts, numerous luminous hosts of angels. He said that the spectacle of nature shuts down all his inspiration. A painter and contemporary, [Sir Joshua]Reynolds, said that the artist who draws or paints should start out working from models, and this made Blake indignant. He said, “For Reynolds, the world is a desert, a desert that must be sown with observation. For me, no. For me, the universe is in my mind; and what I see is pale and very poor compared to the world of my imagination.”
    Now we will return to Swedenborg and Christ, because this is important for Blake’s philosophy. In general it was believed that man, in order to be saved, had to be saved ethically, that is, if a man is just, if he is forgiving and loves his enemies, if he does not do bad deeds, that man is already saved. But Swedenborg goes one step further. He says that man cannot be saved through his behavior, that the duty of every man is to cultivate his intelligence. And Swedenborg gives an example of this. He imagines a poor man, and this poor man’s only desire is to get to Heaven. So he retreats from the world, goes to the desert, let’s say to Thebaid, and lives there without committing a single sin. At the same time, he leads an impoverished mental life—the typical life of cenobites, or hermits. Then, after many years, the man dies and goes to Heaven. When he reaches Heaven, Heaven is much more complex than Earth. The general tendency is to imagine Heaven as disembodied. On the contrary, this Swedish mystic saw Heaven as much more concrete, more complex, richer than Earth. He said, for example, that here we have the colors of the rainbow and the nuances of those colors, but in Heaven, we see an infinite number of colors, colors we cannot even imagine. Shapes, as well. That is, a city in Heaven would be much more complex than a city on Earth, our bodies would be more complex, furniture would be more complex, and thought would as well.
    So the poor saintly man reaches Heaven, and in Heaven there are angels who speak about theology; there are churches—Swedenborg’s Heaven is a theological Heaven. And the poor man wants to participate in the angels’ conversations, but naturally he is lost. He is like a country hick, a peasant who arrives in the city and feels dizzy. At first, he tries to console himself, thinking that he is in Heaven, but then this Heaven bewilders him, gives him vertigo. So he talks to the angels and asks them what he should do. The angels tell him that by devoting himself to pure virtue he has wasted his time on Earth to learn. Finally, God finds a solution—a somewhat sad solution but the only one possible. Sending him to Hell would be terribly unjust, for that man could not live among the devils. Nor need he suffer the torments of envy, hatred, the fires of Hell. And keeping him in Heaven would be condemning him to vertigo, the incomprehension of that much more complex world. So, they look for a place for him in space, and they find one, and there, they allow him to again project his world of the desert, the chapel, the palm tree, the cave. And now that man is there, as he was on Earth, but more unhappy, because he knows that this abode is his eternal abode, the only possible abode for him.
    Blake takes this idea and says, directly: