8 And it fell on a day, that Elisha passed to Shunem, where was a great woman; and she constrained him to eat bread. And so it was, that as oft as he passed by, he turned in thither to eat bread.
9 And she said unto her husband, Behold now, I perceive that this is an holy man of God, which passeth by us continually.
10 Let us make a little chamber, I pray thee, on the wall; and let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick: and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither.
11 And it fell on a day, that he came thither, and he turned into the chamber, and lay there.
2 KÖNIGE 4: 8-11 (Luther Bibel 1545)
8 Und es begab sich zu der Zeit, daß Elisa ging gen Sunem. Daselbst war eine reiche Frau; die hielt ihn, daß er bei ihr aß. Und so oft er daselbst durchzog, kehrte er zu ihr ein und aß bei ihr.
9 Und sie sprach zu ihrem Mann: Siehe, ich merke, daß dieser Mann Gottes heilig ist, der immerdar hier durchgeht.
10 Laß uns ihm eine kleine bretterne Kammer oben machen und ein Bett, Tisch, Stuhl und Leuchter hineinsetzen, auf daß er, wenn er zu uns kommt, dahin sich tue.
11 Und es begab sich zu der Zeit, daß er hineinkam und legte sich oben in die Kammer und schlief darin
◆
I quote these Bible verses in both English and German as I shall other German texts in exploring William Blake’s religious inheritance. The Moravian Church at Fetter Lane, which his mother Catherine Wright Armitage Blake (1725–92) attended, included many German-speaking immigrants including the majority of its early ministers. Catherine’s name first appears in Moravian records on 12 March 1750, in a list of married women to be visited, that is, given one-to-one spiritual counselling. In her letter of application, undated but probably of November 1750, to take communion with the Congregation of the Lamb, Catherine wrote
In this letter we find her using language and imagery typical of German Pietism. She was received into the Congregation on 26 November 1750.I should be glad if I could allways lay at the Cross full as I do know thanks be to him last friday at the love feast Our Savour was pleased to make me Suck his wounds and hug the Cross more then Ever and I trust will more and more till my fraile nature can hould no more
(All I know of Pietism comes from listening to J. S. Bach. Compare the texts of Bach's cantatas permeated by the spirit of Pietism, such BWV 199: Mein Herze schwimmt in Blut [My heart swims in blood], with its recitative “Ich lege mich in diese Wunden” [I lay myself within these wounds]. Consider later their emphasis on “Christ in us”, especially in the frequent use of bride-bridegroom imagery.)
Again, Francis Okely, a Moravian minister in Northampton, was a prolific translator of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century German mystics, not out of antiquarian interest, but because he believed it to be useful for the readership of his spiritually-fallen fellow citizens in eighteenth-century England. Moravian spirituality and Behmenist mysticism seem to have been particularly compatible; at least three English Moravian societies were established on existing Behmenist reading groups. Moravianism helped further spread the influences of Continental mysticism in England.
In 1743, a Fetter-Lane conference agreed that “There shd be always somebody among us to learn German. Br Gottshalk will give the Brn every Day an Hour at 7 in ye Morning after ye Bible-Hour” and also noted “In general an Encouragement was giv’n to ye Brn and Srs to learn German”. Certainly during the time of John Gambold at Fetter Lane (preacher from 1744, Bishop from 1754) I should expect the emphasis on learning German to continue.
Is there a link between his mother’s early contacts with the German community in London and Blake’s own later involvement with German-speaking artists and intellectuals such as George Michael Moser, Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools? Even matters as apparently straightforward as Blake’s reading of the seventeenth-century mystic, Jakob Boehme, his life-long friendship with the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), and his interest in the work of the physiognomist, J. C. Lavater (born in Zürich, in 1741), will need to be reconsidered now that we know that Blake’s mother (and perhaps James Blake, too) would have been acquainted with German-speaking disciples of the Moravian leader, Count Zinzendorf, during their founding evangelism in Nottingham, Yorkshire, and London.
◆
Engraving showing the Communion service at the Fetter Lane Chapel.
This engraving in the Moravian Zeremonienbüchlein (c. 1754) shows the Holy Communion service at the Fetter Lane Chapel in 1754. The Presbyters and Deacon wear albs with red girdles (not, of course, visible here). The Labourers stand on either side of the Liturgist, facing the congregation. Candidates for communicant status, like Catherine, are allowed to look on from the galleries. Note the separation of the sexes, and that there is no altar rail and no shuffling queue. The bread and the wine were distributed to the communicants in their places. This, as so often in the Moravian liturgy, serves to enhance the dignity and stillness, which was much commented on. In early documents, the Moravians are sometimes referred to as “the still brethren”. For them, stillness, as with the Catholic Quietists around Madame Guyon, consisted in waiting quietly for God’s grace. They regarded excessive prayer, bible-reading, and even church attendance, as supererogatory. (Blake himself is recorded as not having entered any place of worship in the last forty years of his life.) Only when you had experienced God’s grace should you put yourself forward for full membership in the Congregation, and partake of Holy Communion. It was in part his quarrel with the idea of stillness that led John Wesley to withdraw from the Fetter Lane community.
Above the communion table we see the closed doors of the pulpit. At Fetter Lane, the pulpit was entered from the adjoining Hall, not from a staircase within the Chapel, and thus formed a little room within the great room of the Chapel. The resemblance to Elisha’s Chamber on the Wall, as in 2 KINGS 4: 10, is, I think, quite deliberate.
◆
Interior of the Moravian Chapel in Fetter Lane, 1897.
The Fetter Lane Chapel was given a more conventional pulpit arrangement in its late nineteenth-century rebuilding.
◆
William Blake 1757–1827.—A Vision: The Inspiration of the Poet (Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall).—c.1819–20?—Graphite and watercolour on paper.—Image: 244 × 211 mm; frame: 525 × 450 × 30 mm.—Tate T05716.
This drawing, with its reminiscence of the Fetter Lane interior, was created around 1820 at the time of Blake’s renewed friendship with the Moravian preachers Jonathan Spilsbury and James Montgomery.
2 KINGS 4: 32-34 (King James Version)◆
32 And when Elisha was come into the house, behold, the child was dead, and laid upon his bed.
33 He went in therefore, and shut the door upon them twain, and prayed unto the Lord.
34 And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm.
2 KÖNIGE 4: 32-34 (Luther Bibel 1545)
32 Und da Elisa ins Haus kam, siehe, da lag der Knabe tot auf seinem Bett.33 Und er ging hinein und schloß die Tür zu für sie beide und betete zu dem HERRN34 und stieg hinauf und legte sich auf das Kind und legte seinen Mund auf des Kindes Mund und seine Augen auf seine Augen und seine Hände auf seine Hände und breitete sich also über ihn, daß des Kindes Leib warm ward.
◆
SIBYLLE ERLE points out that a Blakean juxtaposition of life and death is captured in the drawing—the chamber could also be interpreted as a tabernacle, holding the Communion host, the flesh of Christ. The fact that the tabernacle contains the consecrated element would then be indicated by the candle burning above. And Elisha’s story, bringing a dead boy back to life by stretching himself on top of the boy, placing his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes and his hands on the boy’s hands so that the child’s flesh became warm, becomes an image of the Communion as mystical marriage.
Hymn 2306 from the German Moravian hymnbook of 1748 provides a striking illustration:
Mann! Eh-Mann deiner Blut-Gemein, erkenn dein Volk, jeds Seelgen, so menschlich, speciel, allein, o Mann mit einem Höhlgen! O welch incomparabler Strahl! Küß uns, du kaltes Mündgen! O Leichnam! breit dich aus im Saal, wir liegen da, wies Kindgen.[Man, Husband of your church of blood, have knowledge of your people and of every soul in such a human way, so specially, alone, O Husband with a hole! O what an incomparable ray! Kiss us, you cold little mouth! O corpse! Spread further in this church hall. We are lying here like the child. .... Kiss us, you cold little mouth!—PAUL PEUCKER’s translation]
The child is the dead boy that Elisha brought to life by lying on top of him.
(Towards the end of the 1740s and in the early 1750s Moravian spirituality became increasingly focused on the Communion, and their songs and liturgy eroticized with the language of bridal mysticism. The more explicit German hymns were not translated in the Moravian English hymnals which culminated in John Gambold’s hymnal of 1754, though translations may have circulated in manuscript form. Some of the hymns that were included still managed to shock John Sparrow when he wrote about the 1754 hymnal in Hymns Unbidden (1966). The Moravian hymns also managed to upset E. P. Thompson who refers in Making of the English Working Class (1963) to their “perverted eroticism”. The author of this particular hymn was Count Zinzendorf’s son, Christian Renatus (1727-52), idolized by most members of the church. An androgynous and charismatic young man, he was the object of affection of both Sisters and Brethren, and his premature death in 1752 caused near hysterical grief throughout the Moravian Unity.)
In a homily (sermon) in 1747 Zinzendorf spoke thus of the Communion:
Es ist also ein Actus, wenn sich der Heiland über eine Seele breitet, wie Elisa über den Knaben, damit den zweyen, dem Bräutigam und der Braut, dem Lamm und der Seele geschicht, was der Heiland Matth. 19 sagt προσκολληθησεται, sie werden zusammen geleime, sie werden an einander beseftigt, … es wird was neues, es kommt das heraus.[It is therefore an act when the Saviour spreads over a soul, like Elisha over the boy, so that what happens to these two, to the Bridegroom and the Bride, to the Lamb and the Soul, what the Saviour says in MATTHEW 19[:5]: προσκολληθησεται, they are glued together, they are attached to each other, ... so that something new comes out.—PEUCKER’s translation].
Christ and the Christian become one, as was believed to happen in Communion: “the two will become one flesh”. COLIN PODMORE, essential reading on Moravianism in England, quotes contemporary sources that in the Moravian sacrament “both Corpses died in one another”. Death was the “last Kiss” of the “eternal Bridegroom”.
◆
My friend Bill Goldman, who died earlier this year, once wrote that for Robert Browning, “the poet makes history come alive, resuscitates it as Elisha did the widow’s son”. Here are two other poets following Blake to the story of Elisha:
Each thought of good, the proverb saith,Putteth an evil thought to death.Elisha with his shafts of mindSlew the fantasies of the blind.
RALPH NICHOLAS CHUBB
I see Blake sitting in this same room readingat Elisha’s table a second before he lifts his eyestoward a friend who has no need to be winged angel.There is no bed. An oil lamp radiates light abovesomewhat like a dove. No prints hang on the walls.No poison-penned copies of Bacon & Locke & Newtonclutter the table. The room is free of ideasof good and evil, man as sane or insane, angelor devil. What’s glimpsed through this peepholeis insight greater than any vision: two humanbeings awakened to each other in “Friendship& Brotherhood”, each enlivened by the otherthrough kindness that in intimate silenceand calm opens mouths to taste, eyes to see,hands to feel bodies warm with love.
JIM MCCORD
◆
Sources and further reading
(Part I) William Blake draws Pindar the Greek Poet and Lais the Courtesan (Visionary Heads) for John Varley.
Martin Butlin.—The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols.—New Haven: Yale University Press 1988.
Ralph Nicholas Chubb.—Flames of Sunrise: A Book of the Manchild Concerning the Redemption of Albion.—Fair Oak, Ashford Hill, Newbury, Berks: design’d; illustrated; letter’d; handprinted; & published by the author 1949-53 [1954].
Sibylle Erle.—On This Day in 1820 [18 September 2020].(Part I) William Blake draws Pindar the Greek Poet and Lais the Courtesan (Visionary Heads) for John Varley.
http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=3258
(Part II) The Visionary Heads and William Blake’s attitude towards Death.
Christopher Heppner.—“The Chamber of Prophecy: Blake’s ‘A Vision’ (BUTLIN #756) Interpreted”.—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Volume 25 Issue 3 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 127-31.
Jim McCord.—“Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall.” (A poem).—Blake Journal: The Journal of the Blake Society at St. James’s, Number 10 (London: Blake Society 2006) pp. 96-7.
Moravian Church.—Das Gesang-Buch der Gemeine in Herrn-Huth.—[Halle]: Waysen-Haus [1742- ].Hymn 2306 is printed in the 4th addition to the 12th appendix, 1748.
Paul Peucker.—“‘Inspired by Flames of Love’: Homosexuality, Mysticism, and Moravian Brothers around 1750”.—Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15, No. 1 (January 2006), pp. 30-64.
Paul Peucker.—“In the Blue Cabinet: Moravians, Marriage, and Sex”.—Journal of Moravian History, No. 10, Special Issue: Moravians and Sexuality (Spring 2011), pp. 6-37.
Colin J. Podmore.—The Moravian Church in England, 1728-1760.—Oxford historical monographs.--Oxford: Clarendon Press 1998.
Nicolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf.—Vier-und-dreyßig Homiliae über die Wunden-Litaney der Brüder: gehalten auf dem Herrnhaag in den sommer monathen 1747 von dem Ordinario Fratrum.—Herrnhaag: Brüder-Gemeinen 1747.I quote from “Die sieben und zwanzigste Homilie.”
◆
No comments:
Post a Comment