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Blake Context - Coggle Diagram
Blake Context
Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg underwent a series of spiritual experiences with extensive visions and insight into the afterlife- Blake felt he has visions too
Death: actual experience of death is peaceful and beautiful and the after life is more real than our world
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True Christianity: laments the violent, divisive, condemning, empty nature of church
Blake owned and annotated at least three of Swedenborg's books but turned against Swedenborgians in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Blake attended the first General Conference of New Jerusalem in church in 1789- sympathised with the conference's endorsement of Swedenborg
Blake mistrusted Church's emphasis on avoidance of sin and said Swedenborg's failure lied in his failure to undertsand the nature of evil
Blake thought heaven and hell were representations of the human heart and while angels represented conservative values devils were rebels
Political turmoil
Blake's was a time of turmoil arising out of challenges to established ideas about monarchy, hierarchy, human nature and human rights.
Rousseau was the first philosopher of Romanticism, valuing feeling and innocence
Rousseau also held that children were born good and had an in-built capacity to learn through experience. Formal education distorted the child's creativity, imagination and freedom to develop
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rebellion took political form in the American war of Independence and the French Revolution which Blake originally supported until it turned to violence
didn't fully enter any political movement because most radicals were Deists or freethinkers. Admired Thomas Paine for his support of equality and non-hierarchical democracy but disagreed with Paine's anti-Christian beliefs
Dissenter believed hereditary power was wrong as it divided people into classes. God did not intend this enslavement when he created human beings.
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Blake's life
During his own lifetime, Blake was a pronounced failure, and he harbored a good deal of resentment and anxiety
was son to a hosier and his wife, both Dissenters.
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two of his six siblings died in infancy and his beloved brother, Robert, died from tuberculosis in 1787. At the moment of Robert's death, Blake allegedly saw his spirit
his parents tried to discourage him from "lying," (his father beat him) they did observe that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend conventional school.
Blake taught himself to read, write and draw and became an apprentice to an engraver with Westminster Abbey being his no1 inspiration in which he experienced visions
Blake taught Catherine Boucher his wife. They didn't have any children as Blake's deep interest in the spiritual world meant he had lack of time for anyone else
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Religious beliefs
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Christianity bound people in shame or fear of punishment and was an agent of social control as messages of love and brotherhood became those of cruelty
Blake rejected the concept of a transcendent God focusing on the presence of Holy Spirit as a principle of each person's inner life
Rejected old testament stereotype of God as vengeful and punitive and binds people with prohibitions
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Fall of Adam and Eve was a fall into a distorted way of seeing God, the world and the self
The Fall caused people to see themselves as seperate, isolated individuals and brought about the seperation of the sexes rather than live in harmony
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