8.Good and Evil

7/27/2019 8.Good and Evil

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Good and evil ( ex: Blake)

In religion, ethics, and philosophy, the phrase, good and evil refers to the location

on a two-way spectrum of objects, desires, or behaviors, the good direction being

morally positive, and the evil direction morally negative. Good is a broad concept

but it typically deals with an association with life, charity, continuity, happiness,love, and prosperity. Evil is more simply defined: the opposite of good. The good

and evil of a context represents a personal judgment, a societal norm, or either's

claim to an absolute value related to the human nature or transcendent religious

standard for that context.

One of the key aspects of romanticism is the presentation of heroes and villains.

Heroes - to present man as he ought to be.

Villains - to present man as he ought not to be.

2) The struggle between the good and evil is an important theme

3) Man is presented as volitional i.e. it is his choices that dictate whether he is good

or evil.

William Blakes poetry is even more interesting for our argument.Blake

compared himself to biblical prophets and wanted to create something like a

religion

of his own in which the ideas of good and evil were, in his own words, married,

and

evil, at least in his early works, could play the role of good. Here Blake, exploiting

with polemical gusto the Protestant search for a religion of the heart free from all

dogmas, in reality exceeded the limits of Protestantism and even Christianity itself.

In his discourse All Religions are One Blake wrote: The Religions of all Nations

are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is

everywhere calld the Spirit of Prophesy. The Jewish and Christian Testaments are

an original derivation from the Poetic Genius. As becomes clear from his other


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early works, for Blake the Spirit of Prophesy, or the Poetic Genius, is the same as

imagination idolized by many Romantic writers. Later the poet identified

imagination

with Jesus Christ Himself saying that Human Imagination is the Divine Body of the

Lord Jesus, blessed for ever.

There are many influences which can be traced in Blakes poetry and painting

with their dark, not yet fully deciphered symbolism and very personal mythology.

Some of these influences include the poets radicalism and his love for the Bible

and Christian epics by Dante and Milton, as well as his interest in Gnosticism, neo-

platonism, the Kabbala, and books by Boehme and Swedenborg. As time went on

some of Blakes ideas were transformed and the accents changed. The poet

gradually

departed from the rebellion of his youth against the surrounding world where the

Beast and the Whore rule without control and began to accept the mood of

quietism,

the values of love, peace and forgiveness. That is why Blakes attitude to good and

evil, as well as his attitude to Satan, whom the poet in his youth called my

particular

friend, also changed. From the energetic spirit who could help peoples happiness

in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil

is

the active springing from energy) Satan later in Milton turned into an

embodiment

of that same Reason so much hated by the poet or into an image of the fallen

material

world (The Four Zoas) and still later in the illustrations for The Book of Job he

became a false god who terrorizes Job by his claims to the role of Supreme

Godhead.

And God the Father turned from an Old Testament tyrant resembling the Gnostics


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evil Demiurge into a kind creature capable of forgiving sins and resembling the

father from the parable of the Prodigal Son. But in spite of the poets closeness to

the unorthodox Christianity of his later years, Blakes faith remained an individual

religion where his main God was his imagination and the Divine Vision still

consisted in his extraordinary ability to see the endless and eternal in the ordinary

and

simple, in a wild flower or a grain of sand. So the circle so to speak closed and

Blake,

at least in his youth, followed the path trodden by Gnostics, Cathars and

Albigensians.

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8.Good and Evil