The Spirituality of Binaries in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

Since the earliest of Christian theologians, from Athanasius to Dionysius, God was principally defined as an inherently incomprehensible entity; He defied our conceptions of space and time and transcended the physical and material limitations of the human universe. “God,” as the controversial yet telling axiom went, “does not exist” in our understanding of the word. William Blake, particularly through the joining and emphasis of binaries, flips this idea on its head in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” creating a spiritual yet decidedly humanistic theology.

He begins by citing Ezekiel 37, a binary in its own right. “Springs” grow on “tombs,” “serpents” walk in “mild humility” and a “just man rages,” immediately establishing the confluence of opposites. Whereas Christian dogma presents good and evil as entirely incompatible, Blake instead claims that their joining is “necessary to human existence.” Note that Blake emphasizes this “human existence” as something of primary importance rather than simply a vehicle to purge sin and attain eternal life.

Blake refuses to define his spirituality by something beyond the perceptible. He defines the senses as the “chief inlets of the soul.” The soul is not set aside as something separate from the physical, but is instead presented as something inherently physical. This idea stresses the material, uniting the traditional dogmatic binary of body and soul into something deeply spiritual yet defined by its humanity.

This humanistic theology is advanced later on. The Ancient Greeks, Blake argues, were the truly enlightened ones, defining their Gods by “the properties of…whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.” Religion is inextricably intertwined with man, to the extent that “All deities reside in the human breast.” Not only does God “exist,” but God is in fact the very essence of human existence.

Where the Church rigidly creates binaries between the physical and the heavenly (heaven vs. hell, body vs. soul, good vs. evil) Blake finds true religion captured inside of them. As the prophets tell him in the most powerful scene of the work, “my senses discovered the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, and remain confirmd; that the voice of honest indignation if the voice of God…” Holiness is embodied in that sensory and humanistic “infinite,” a theology that rather than disregarding the “finite and corrupt” is composed of it — an “infinite” spiritual force comprised of good and evil, heaven and hell.