William Blake, the Bible and Western culture

I'm currently reading the poet and critic Kathleen Raine's great work on William Blake and Job. Blake was a poet and painter/engraver from the end of the 18th and early 19th century. Her book is on Blake's illustrations to the Old Testament book The Book of Job. Blake, like most western artists until relatively recently, drew inspiration from the Bible. This was seen as normal, and was sometimes even unconscious, so ingrained was Christianity in the collective mind and spirit, the "DNA" of even the most modest person socially and economically. So it is impossible to understand the West's artistic heritage on the deepest levels (often, even on the most basic levels) without a knowledge and appreciation of biblical text, particularly in the form of the stories, because the Judeo-Christian scriptures embody meaning essentially as story, "mythos". The meaning unfolds largely in narrative form. This is what is meant by "myth", which is not some invention to be opposed to "real historical fact". In any case, the deepest levels of meaning revealed to us when we hear a story are not on the historical level. They disclose themselves to us in the present encounter with the text, our experience of the text, as it were.

The Book of Job is the story of a wealthy and pious man who falls prey to a series of terrible events depriving him of all he had: family, material goods and pĥysical health. It is an archetypal story of Man's suffering, and transcending this suffering, thus prefiguring the Christ story itself. The Bible is made up of patterns of story in this way.

To be ignorant of these narratives (the Creation Myth, the Fall of Man, Noah and the Flood, exodus and exile in Egypt, Samson and Delilah, and the Christ narrative and the narratives within this narrative in the form of Jesus's parables, the list is endless) is to be alienated from one's own culture (and spiritual foundations, if one is open to such a thing as a spiritual nature). This on one level is nothing to do with "belief". We might begin more easily with "meaning". It is more than useful for example to have a Biblical knowledge when reading or watching Shakespeare. This takes its form mainly symbolically, including symbol in movement, as unfolding dramatic narrative. Even in King Lear, a play which takes place in pagan Britain, the blueprint is largely Christian.

Click below to access examples of Blake's illustrations (Job surrounded by his family at the beginning, Job suffering scorn, Job's final blessings), and the extract from Raine's work:  

Chaucer - The Knight's Tale

A while ago I published a brief post on Medieval literature, and have been meaning for a long time to put up texts from this wonderfully creative period. It is about time I did! So here is an example from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.  This is regarded as the greatest work of the period, and Chaucer as the father of English poetry. The English language had been growing in status during the Middle Ages, both as a scholarly and literary medium. Since the Norman invasion, French had become the language of the court, and Latin had maintained its position as the medium for the highest levels of thinking and creativity. But the winds were changing in the fifteenth century. The Canterbury Tales contain a series of stories related by individuals from varied strata of society: the Wife of Bath, the Knight, the Miller, the Franklin etc. Each character entertains his or her companions with a tale during the famous pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered on the orders of King Henry II on 29th December 1120. As a consequence, he became a martyr and a saint. 

Each tale is wonderfully rich and entertaining, full of action, love stories, philosophical reflections, and sometimes bawdy humour! They are written in the classic iambic pentametre of English verse, more precisely in 'Herioc Verse' (ten syllable rhyming couplets). 

Below is an extract from The Knight's Tale, the point at which the young Theban lover Arcite, banished from Athens, and pining for his belovéd Emyle, decides to pull himself together and out of his hopelessly languishing lover state, dress up as  a pauper and return in disguise to the Greek city. Do not be put off by Middle English. This is not Old English (which would be incomprehensible, and needs to be learned as another language), but the English language gradually blossoming into what we know today. There are lexical difficulties (well explained by the notes from the Norton Edition), and syntactical intricacies which come from a naturally poetic style, and convention, and a more germanic word order: 'Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was...' - nothing too obscure! I have a particular fondness for this tale, because it is the one I studied at school when I was seveneen/eighteen. Click on the link below to access the excerpt: