Religious Thoughts In Blake's Jerusalem

Blake remains in a position to become a significant force in revolutionizing the basis of English literature. He is a prophet who convinced that he has rediscovered the truth of Christianity, which had become perverted by the Churches. Blake's religious thoughts are complex and inconsistent as many critics have asserted in the study of Blake. His poetry especially Jerusalem is a structure of images and symbols that expresses his point of view in Christianity.By surveying former studies on Blake's Jerusalem and various kinds of methods to analysis his poetry, we assume religious thoughts in Jerusalem which Blake designed his elaborately rather than accepting a traditional and institutional religion lacks deeper and systematic analysis. So this provides the significance of the present thesis.Chapter One analyzes Blake's visionary life and divine imagination in his works. Blake believes that true religious experience is obtained not by curbing the natural desires as in traditional Christianity, but by emancipating the human beings and establishing the indirect connection between the individual and God. Thus Blake's poetic motives in Jerusalem are the highest imaginable: to describe humanity's relationship to the divine and to diagnose the nature of the fallen condition of human beings. In Jerusalem, he is a Christian who repulses the Church and a revolutionary who detests the rationalism and materialism of the radicals. He deems that man's vital imaginations cannot be suppressed or displaced in the understanding and interpretation of the Bible.Chapter Two discusses Blake's resistance to any single religious meaning, so does he to any single doctrine as he combines the epic tradition with the myths of Britain to construct different theological systems and biblical images in Jerusalem. They frustrate disciplinary forms of proper identity, normal sequences and traditional plot. Compared with Milton and Spencer, Blake believes himself is an incarnation of prophet and Jerusalem is the quest of the prophetic spirit in England moving mankind towards the ultimate confrontation of the forces of destruction to pursue individuality and unification with God through the way of one's own imagination. Although Blake's rhetorical apocalypse seems complicatedly structured than rational men could have acknowledged, it could be combed out through the analysis combined with epic tradition with myths of Britain.Chapter Three concludes Blake in term of his religious identity in Jerusalem. Through the analysis of influences he has received and his unique understanding of the Bible, Blake's religious thoughts are proved more than the concept of a conventional Christian. He disagrees with the way that the Church has stipulated Christians to view the God enthroned in heaven which has offered a model for a hierarchical society and human condition and made the majority subordinate to a superior elite without direct connections. Also he criticizes the dominant philosophy of his time which senses experience could help people to understand everything that there was to be known including God. In Jerusalem his religious thoughts concerned the struggle of the soul to free its imagination from reason and traditional organized religion.This thesis concludes that Blake's Jerusalem is a long and brilliant cosmology of consciousness which reflects his unique religious thoughts through analyses concerning Blake's idea of vision and imagination, utilization of epic tradition and prophecy, religious and mythological influences he has received. Indifferent to the demand of any orthodoxy religious church, William Blake inscribes a theology with his own life and belief that expressed in his Jerusalem, thus holds man as the end of his quest and exalts individuality and freedom of imagination. It is sincerely hoped that this thesis could offer a new perspective on studying Blake's religious thoughts and humanism through deciphering Blake's contributions to poetics.