The Human Face of God
Deen, Leonard W.
Face of God, face of Blake THE HUNAN FACE OF GOD WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE BOOK OF JOB Kathleen Raine Thames and Hudson, $35, 320 pp. Leonard W. Deen THE HUMAN FACE OF GOD provides a centrifugal...
...One of the fascinations of Blake's book, however, is in the separate yet mirroring "identities" of Job, God, Satan...
...Raine has brought together poet Blake and philosopher Jung...
...276...
...Perhaps the point is that God answers Job at all-that Job is enlightened by seeing that God is "mindful" of man, and that ' 'his eyes are upon the ways of Man & he observeth all his goings" (plate 12...
...The result is a richly informed account of Blake's whole "system...
...She is of course less "literary critic" or art historian than mythologist or comparative religionist like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade...
...His Job engravings are a night vision...
...In the other plates, Satan is clearly distinguished from both God and Job, who resemble each other...
...Thus, though the Job plates have a simplicity of design approaching that of stained-glass windows, with the light often seeming to come from behind, over the horizon, the designs are supported by texts and countertexts and marginal details which demand to be "read" along with the designs...
...The book of Job as Blake illuminates it continually points to what is to come: Jesus and the forgiveness of sins...
...Each sees Blake in the light of a whole system of belief...
...For Blake, man sees God as either the Accuser or Forgiver of Sin...
...But the dominant texts and designs are faithful to the Book of Job in the Old Testament...
...The center of The Human Face of God is filled with one hundred twenty-nine reproductions of Blake's painting and graphic work (often several on a page)-twenty-two of which are full-page Job plates...
...Furthermore, it prophesies: "Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of Light & his Ministers into Ministers of Righteousness...
...He is himself born as one and must become the other...
...Here the three primary figures of the drama become two, and image or confront each other in the pit...
...We begin, in plate 1, with the sun setting (it is still setting in plates 6 and 7), and pass through a long night to end in the coming of day, where one of the planets attending the moon may be Lucifer become "an Angel of Light...
...Leonard W. Deen THE HUMAN FACE OF GOD provides a centrifugal commentary on William Blake's Job in twenty-two short chapters-each an excursus on one of Blake's plates...
...Although it is a dream- "In dreams thou affrightest me with visions"-this plate offers more support than any other for S. Foster Damon's assertion that in Blake's Job all takes place in Job' mind...
...As for the action, Satan's furious motion, unleashed by God, dominates plates 2,3,5, and 6-entering God's presence, leaving it (in a controlled and voluntary fall), smiting Job's sons and flocks or Job himself, and finally, falling...
...Plate 11 is the active center on which the 22 plates of Job turn...
...Raine weighs them evenly: While Blake sees the central issue of the Book of Job as being Job's self-righteousness, his refusal to understand that the living God is neither moral nor immoral, Jung sees the amoral God of the Old Testament as an archaic, rudimentary, undeveloped concept...
...For Blake "the two contrary states of the human soul" are night and day...
...This gives us the choice of treating his work as Gospel or Art or both...
...Blake condemns Plato for his moralism...
...we begin and end with a static tableau...
...Jung abundantly respects the force of images, of the unconscious, and of poets...
...On plate 11, they seem to converge...
...and we find satori, may a, atma, karma coming in for support on the "spirit" side, though the words are not to be found in Blake...
...Blake would add, a human form...
...belief in the spirit...
...The real force of The Human Face of God-its most concentrated, vigorous order-comes at the end, in "Blake's Job and Jung's Job," where Ms...
...Blake's Jesus . . . comes to end the moral law by the law of love...
...If Blake and Jung see two different faces of God, both are indubitably "Human.' ' Kathleen Raine agrees with Blake (and I think Jung) that it could not be otherwise...
...Job lies on his back beneath a God/Satan stretched out above, facing him, his body in the coils of a serpent, his feet cloven, one hand pointing to the Tables of the Law above, one hand to hell beneath (where devils try to drag Job down by loins and feet)-his face almost the image of Job's...
...If we nevertheless look at the Job plates before "reading" them, we notice that they are divided between the static and the wildly active...
...And in plate 16, where Satan falls, an infant haloed head in the light surrounding God signifies God's intention to incarnate himself-so Raine is convinced...
...What the change in the book is, and what causes it, remains a problem...
...In reading, we see that the visually dominant text or design is often countered by a subordinate one...
...the creature has surpassed the creator," a "Faustian flourish...
...and his Answer to Job is a vision strong enough to stand beside Blake's...
...One of Blake's peculiarities is "identifying" art and religion, as in the teeming "Laocoon" plate: "Art is the Tree of Life God is Jesus...
...Blake's total rejection of a moral religion is the religion of the mystics, and doubtless it is the ultimate truth...
...But Kathleen Raine does not attend to Blake's "Minute Particulars" or "discriminate & particular lines" aesthetically as much as intellectually -as signs of Blake's thought and belief...
...We note also the division into vertical levels and into central designs and marginal ones, central texts and marginal ones, unbroken texts and those divided, balanced, slanting, vertical...
...Jung [praises it] as an advance in human consciousness (p...
...near the center, a crescendo of energy...
...It is not only the most terrifying of Job's visions but the one in which Job affirms his belief: "I know that my Redeemer liveth...
...On plate 12, Job sleeps the sleep of death in the marginal design at the bottom even while, in the central design, he attends to the words of Elihu, who is pointing to the stars...
...In Blake's "Auguries of Innocence," God Appears & God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of day...
...But] whether the world . . . can yet dispense with the moral code is a matter upon which Jung might be a better judge than Blake (p...
...A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian...
...In Blake's Job engravings, the Accuser/Affrighter is cast out, God the Creator is praised, and the Forgiver of Sins is still expected (though he may be present as the "bright and morning star" of Revelation...
...Seeing Blake as a prophet, visionary, and mystic, she repeatedly joins the issue of materialism vs...
...John upon the identity of the Father and the Son...
...Perhaps we ought to speak of "transformations" rather than "change" in Blake's Job...
...Put side by side, their views sometimes accord, sometimes clash, but Ms...
...Job's faith has survived his night vision of death, but it is not yet full day: it is sunrise...
...Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists...
...277): Finally, Kathleen Raine finds Jung's assertion that "Job stands morally higher than Yahweh...
...Job remains the largely motionless target or place of action...
...Jehovah in Blake's Job has not yet become Jesus (as he did earlier, in Blake's Jerusalem), but plate 17 repeats, as Raine says, "the complete teaching of the Gospel of St...
...Kathleen Raine's thesis is that God in Blake's Job presents a human face...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 3
