'Dip him in the river who loves water'

"I know of no other Christianity," Blake once said, "and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination." The Marriage of Heaven and Hell defends this liberty, and indeed argues for an even broader freedom, the enemy of which is the Orthodox Church's definition of good: reason and restraint. In the Proverbs of Hell, Blake writes: "Dip him in the river who loves water" (57). This proverb, which could be rephrased "if it feels good, do it," echoes throughout the work. In order to defend his vision of indulgence, which he calls liberty, Blake at first upsets the reader's notions of absolute good and evil. He then criticizes orthodox religion for attempting to restrain desire, and even uses Jesus Christ Himself to demonstrate the fallacy of restrictions.

Blake writes that from the contraries of energy and reason "spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy" (55). Orthodox religion, at least in Blake's opinion, treats energy and desire as evils that must be conquered by the good of restraint and reason. Blake, however, supports the liberty that arises from the indulgence of desires and the exercise of energy. In order to justify this vision of freedom, he must first upset the orthodox notions of good and evil. To convince the reader that one should "dip him in the river who loves water," Blake creates a moral relativism in which there is no absolute good or evil. Desire, he argues, is not all bad, nor is restraint all good. Rather, "without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence" (55).

To prove that desire is not an absolute evil nor restraint an absolute good, Blake confuses the roles of God and Satan. In Paradise Lost, writes Blake, "the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah" (56). In Paradise Lost, Jesus Christ, called the Messiah, governs mankind by serving as its moral accuser. "But in the Book of Job," argues Blake, "Milton's Messiah is call'd Satan" (56). For, in the book of Job, Satan, and not Christ, is the moral accuser of Job. If Satan and Christ can play the same roles, then how can there be absolutes? Furthermore, Blake writes that the same history "has indeed been adopted by both parties" (56). Both the traditional good and evil, Christ and the devil, share the same history:

The Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, and formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss. This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter, or Desire, that Reason may have Ideas to build on (56).

The devil was considered evil because he rebelled against the established authority. Christ too rebelled against the established authority of His time, the Pharisees. Therefore, if one is to hold fast to the absolute definitions of good and evil, the Messiah and the Devil must be one and the same, "the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire" (56). The Holy Spirit, or Comforter, whom Christ asks the Father to send is Desire, because it represents the Spirit of Christ, which, like Satan's, is a spirit of rebellion. Blake confuses the devil and the Messiah in this passage to show the absurdity of establishing energy as an expression of absolute evil. If mere attributes such as desire and energy determine evil, then Christ must be evil, because he was full of energy and desire. And if reason is always good, then Satan must be good, because he reasons.

By confusing the roles of Christ and Satan, Blake confuses anyone who wishes to think in clear terms of good and evil. Having obscured the notion of moral absolutes, Blake makes the orthodox reader more receptive to his Proverbs of Hell. What before might have seemed over-indulgent now seems reasonable, because Blake has exploded the idea that the indulgence of desire is evil. Throughout the proverbs, Blake reiterates the theme: "Dip him in the river who loves water." Two proverbs, "he who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence" and "the cistern contains; the fountain overflows" suggest that not only is acting on desire not evil, but such gratification is necessary to prevent the problems that suppression may cause (57-58). Restraining desires creates a cistern within, whereas satisfied desires are like a beautiful, overflowing fountain. "Expect poison from the standing water" also implies that restraint, or stagnation, is ultimately dangerous (58). And, to note just one more, energy can be superior to reason because "the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction" (58).

Orthodox religion not only fails to recognize the virtues of energy and desire, it actively seeks to repress them with reason and restraint. There are two types of men, writes Blake, the prolific (traditionally the evil) and the devouring (traditionally the good). Blake continues:

These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.

Religion is an endeavor to reconcile the two. (61)

Blake desires a marriage of heaven and hell, but his concept of a marriage differs from that endorsed in orthodox religion. In an orthodox marriage, the woman would submit to her husband. Similarly, reconciling the two contraries, in the orthodox view, requires the submission of one to the other--the prolific to the devouring, the "evil" to the "good." Blake, however, envisions a marriage in which two contraries remain in opposition, neither submitting to the other, and the life of the marriage arises from the very energy that exists between them. Orthodox religion maintains that the ultimate progress is a reconciliation of contraries that culminates in the destruction of evil by good. Blake, however, asserts that whoever seeks such a reconciliation seeks to destroy existence, for, as he insisted earlier in his work, "without Contraries there is no progression."

Perhaps suspecting his own arguments may not be enough to convince the orthodox reader, Blake maintains that Jesus Christ, the professed Head of the Orthodox Church, supported this sustained division: "Jesus Christ did not wish to unite but to separate them, as in the Parable of the sheep and the goats! & he says, `I came not to send Peace but a sword'" (61). Blake supposes the parable in which Christ separates the sheep from the goats is analogous to separating the contraries, and that Christ's claim to bring a sword represents his wish to maintain tension between the contraries rather than provide a peace that would require the submission of energy to restraint. Furthermore, contends Blake, Jesus Christ Himself did not refrain from satisfying his desires, and he scoffed at the restraints of the Pharisees' orthodox religion. Did he not "mock at the sabbath...[and] turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery" (64)? The orthodox reader will naturally respond to these claims with the defense that the Pharisees laws regarding the Sabbath were too restrictive and failed to allow for healing, and that those who were about to stone the adulterous women were being hypocritical. But such a response only undergirds Blake?s position. The restraints the Pharisees placed on Christ were unreasonable and hypocritical, just as, felt Blake, were the restraints orthodox religion placed on desire in his day. "Jesus," concludes Blake, "was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not rules" (64). Jesus acted out His desires; He did not attempt to restrain them.

The final line of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell reads: "One Law for the Lion & the Ox is Oppression" (64). The statement sums up Blake's entire justification of dipping "into the river him who loves water." You can not unite the two contraries under one absolute law. Just as the Lion and the Ox operate under different laws, so reason and energy operate under different laws. To confine energy by the law of reason would destroy energy, and therefore existence. Blake insists there is no single law, no moral absolute, by which man is governed. Rather, he supports the abundant life he believes results from the sustained tension between contraries. The orthodox vision of heaven, in which the contraries have been reconciled because restraint has entirely conquered energy, does not appeal to Blake. He confronts the Angel who represents orthodox religion: "We have seen my eternal lot, shall I shew you yours?" (62). The picture he then paints of heaven is a portrait of imprisonment and stagnation: "monkeys, baboons, & all of that species, chaind by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but withheld by the shortness of their chains" (62). He then describes how they are "devourd, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk." The orthodox heaven, where good has defeated evil and restraint has conquered desire, is to Blake a devouring place. When the contraries are reconciled, when the devouring entirely destroys the prolific, existence too is destroyed, just as the bodies are left helpless trunks.

Ultimately, however, Blake is not reversing the roles of good and evil, he is arguing that there is virtue in both reason and energy, and that neither is an absolute. Although he devotes most of his work to defending the virtues of desire and energy, he does not seem to believe that desire should know no bounds. Blake writes in the Proverbs of Hell: "Sooner murder and infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" (58). It seems unlikely that Blake would choose to use this phrasing, which ought to offend the moral sensibilities of even the most committed relativist, if he wished to argue that desire should never be restrained. Indeed, as he says in another proverb: "Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps" (57). Any desire or energy can be taken to an extreme that, unchecked, will produce the opposite of its intended virtue. Energy and Desire must, to some degree, be restrained by reason. Otherwise, energy would have defeated reason, and the contraries would not exist. "Dip him in the river who loves water" because energy is not an absolute evil, but do not indulge your desires to the point of conquering all reason, because neither is desire an absolute good. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, there are no absolutes.

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Works Cited

Blake, William. "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Norton Anthology of English Literature