Blake, imagination and the insight of God

A new exhibition focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

William Blake's illustration of God squatting down to create with his hair and beard blown to one side

Blake's Ancient of Days.

The Fitzwilliam Museum.

The exhibition William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, enables visitors to discover a constellation of European Romantic artists who sought spirituality in their lives and art in response to war, revolution and political turbulence.

The exhibition brings together the largest-ever display of works by the radical British artist, printmaker and poet from the Fitzwilliam Museum's collection, alongside artworks by Blake's European contemporaries such as the German romantic painters Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich – many of which have never been displayed publicly in the UK until now. Though they never met or connected in their lifetimes, Blake, Runge and Friedrich shared an unwavering belief in the power of art to redeem a society in crisis.

Blake believed it ‘is only the imagination’, the faculty we have neglected, which can lead us out of our self-imposed prison.

The exhibition also places Blake within his artistic network in Britain, drawing parallels with the work of his peers, mentors and followers including Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, and Samuel Palmer. In the exhibition catalogue Esther Chadwick draws attention to a little-known series of paintings in which ‘Blake is shown partaking in an immense community of like-minded intellectuals of the European Romantic generation.’ These include writers and poets associated with Runge, as well as artists and poets such as Flaxman, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Flaxman introduced Charles Augustus Tulk, a well-known Swedenborgian, to Blake, to whom Tulk later introduced Coleridge saying ‘Blake and Coleridge, when in company seemed like congenial beings from another sphere breathing for a while on our earth’.

Exhibition curators David Bindman and Chadwick have said: “This is the first exhibition to show William Blake not as an isolated figure but as part of European-wide attempts to find a new spirituality in face of the revolutions and wars of his time. We are excited to be able to shed new light on Blake by placing his works in dialogue with wider trends and themes in European art of the Romantic period, including transformations of classical tradition, fascination with Christian mysticism, belief in the coming apocalypse, spiritual regeneration and national revival.”

Independently of each other, Blake and Runge were inspired by the writings of German mystic Jacob Böhme, who, as Bindman and Chadwick explain, ‘believed that all being arises from the dynamic interplay of opposites: between darkness and light, life and death, hot and cold, male and female’. As a result, he viewed our spiritual quest as ‘the reconciliation of differences to produce spiritual and philosophical regeneration’. Bryan Aubrey has also shown that Böhme believed human beings can share in the divine imagination, through which we act ‘with, and on behalf of, the creator’. Böhme ‘equated the strong imagination with the faith that moves mountains’ while Blake believed it ‘is only the imagination’, the faculty we have neglected, which can lead us out of our self-imposed prison. Blake was, as a result, indebted to Böhme for his concept of the imagination and his doctrine of contraries.

This exhibition demonstrates that many of great Romantic philosophers and writers were seeking just such a spiritual regeneration and national revival.

Melanie Öhlenbach has argued that ‘Runge's life, his theory and works bear testimony to Böhme's importance’. For Runge, art ‘is considered as the revelation of God and the artist as its tool, while the artist's imagination creates the insight of God’. He believed it is ‘the artists' duty to re-create the diverging harmony of man and cosmos in the sense of an artistic-spiritual revolution’. She writes that due to his early death, ‘Runge managed only partly to put his ambitions into practice’, notably in his Times of Day series which represent not only the changing times of day, but the seasons, the ages of humanity and historical epochs. Similarly, Friedrich’s seven sepia drawings The Ages of Man are thought to be inspired by Runge’s interest in visual representations of time, meaning that this exquisitely delicate series is associated with the themes of change in nature, the cyclical representation of time and the temporality of human life.

The significance of these artists is, in part, as prophets within the Christian tradition. Lucy Winkett has noted that ‘Blake’s faith was in the Jesus whom he believed the Church had abandoned’. As a result, ‘he was — and still is — an internal rather than external critic of the way in which the Christian faith is practised by its adherents; and so, for those who have ears to hear, his is a prophetic rather than destructive force within the Christian tradition’. Richard A. Rosengarten states that ‘Blake wanted to stir things up because he thought the Christian revelation was meant to stir things up’. He argues that, for Blake, the ‘first step in doing so (after reading the Bible from stem to stern) was to liberate Imagination from the shackles of Reason’. This is what ‘could make us fully human again, and thus much more approximately the creatures of God that we truly are’.

Malcolm Guite suggests that both Blake and Coleridge: ‘recognised Jesus as the Divine Imagination and Love bodied forth for us and kindling afresh in us the love and imagination which is God’s lost image deep in our souls. Both men were calling for England (‘Albion’ in Blakes terms) to awaken from the sleep of materialism, greed and conquest, and to be renewed in Christ through an awakening of the spiritual imagination.’

This exhibition demonstrates that many of great Romantic philosophers and writers were seeking just such a spiritual regeneration and national revival. In our own time of war, revolution and political turbulence, it may be that this is a prescient exhibition bringing us artists who, as Winkett said of Blake, have ‘a distinctively Christian voice for our time’.

In Jerusalem, one of Blake’s illuminated books from which many plates are shown in this exhibition, Blake writes: ‘I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination – Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.’

William Blake’s Universe, 23 February 2024 - 19 May 2024, Fitzwilliam Museum.

Watch the exhibition trailer

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Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

Zombies

24 October 2024

5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.

Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children.

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies.

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies.

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it.

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived.

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do.

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish.

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains.

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.