Brothers and Utopia

After a difficult few weeks workwise I'm trying very hard to throw myself back into the academic pool. At the moment, I'm mired in rather dry scholarship on William Blake and his context: the type that has a lot of material and requires much mental energy to sift out the relevant details. So to renew my vigour, I'm spending half an hour  reflecting on one of the other cornerstones of my project: Richard Brothers.

I have been extremely remiss in not posting more about Brothers in the life of this blog. In many respects, he's one of the most fascinating characters in my DPhil. Brothers was formerly a naval officer, before leaving the Navy after receiving his prophetic calling. Prior to achieving real infamy in the mid-1790s through his polemical pamphlets Revealed Knowledge, Brothers found himself largely destitute and forced to the workhouse on account of refusing to give the oath required for him to receive his military pension. It was during this period that Brothers began to receive visions portending the future destruction of London.

The cry for social justice is heard powerfully when reading Brothers' pamphlets. In his second Revealed Knowledge, Brothers gives the following blistering critique of life in London under the Pitt administration:

"THE POOR ARE ENTIRELY DESTITUTE HERE... No man, who has any knowledge of God, can justly say, that London is without guilt, and her people are without sin; when her Streets are full of Vice, and her Prisons are full of Oppression.”

Brothers' desire for God's wrathful intervention against London/Babylon is in part motivated by the deep unfairness which he experienced and perceived within the city. At a time of proletariat and republican uprising in France (with ramifications felt in Britain, e.g. the Priestley Riots in Birmingham) Brothers rails against the economic disparity he felt in British society co-ordinated by Pitt. Brothers forcefully tries to call London to repentance, and his writings act as an urgent call for those who think they are living in Jerusalem, to realise they are in fact citizens of wicked Babylon.

There is much in Brothers' early writing which is extraordinarily powerful (even if his use of scripture to collate a case of "doom" against London isn't exactly innovative stuff...) but for my purposes, it is his solution to the problem of late-nineteenth century Britain which is most interesting. Brothers records a compulsion and a calling from God to lead the rediscovered lost tribes of Israel and rebuild Jerusalem. London is saved from the immediate threat of destruction thanks only to Brothers' special pleading to God. Why does God take the time to listen to him, you may ask? Why, because, Brothers is in fact "the Nephew of the Almighty", the "Prince of the Hebrews", the new messiah to lead the restored Israelites to their former glory and reinstitute God's kingdom and chosen people into this fallen world of conflict and injustice.

Brothers' solution, part of the Anglo-Israelism tradition in British prophecy sees Brothers leading a redeemed people into the eschatological city. Yet his hope for a "new earth" (Revelation 21:1) is metaphorical: Jerusalem will play an active part in world affairs; it will function as a new model of economic and political relations with the "nations". The King himself is revealed by Brothers to be amongst the hidden tribes who will form part of Jerusalem! Yet it is in this conception of Jerusalem as a new, divinely endorsed imperial power which gives Brothers' prophecies its most tragically flawed dimension. Rather than imagining a new world, one free of the former disparities he railed so strongly against, Brothers imagines an idealized kingdom, set up in the desert, with himself as ruler and chief architect. After he was arrested and committed to an asylum in 1795, Brothers lived out his days writing pamphlets describing his city in minute detail, and even designing its flags and military uniforms. Essentially, Brothers failed to offer a "new holy city" even if he did try and base his designs upon the descriptions of the redeemed Jerusalem in Ezekiel 40-48 and Revelation 21-22. The only difference between Brothers' Jerusalem and Pitt's London was that, in Brothers' mind, God had decreed that Brothers was in the right.

The irony of Brothers' attempts to mentally construct a city which acted as the counterpoint to the London in which he saw Satan walk undetected is, to my mind, powerfully reflected in this statement from a pamphlet of 1805:

“all men shall live in private as they please, but it must be in houses to encourage the industry of building, as well as the divine benefit of marriage. It shall be the land of true liberty!”

Brothers' Jerusalem strives after wealth and political power just as much as he felt Pitt's London did. It rather puts me in mind of the Tears for Fears song "Everybody Wants To Rule The World."  Brothers' prophetic idealization of Jerusalem, whatever his distress at the inequalities pervading the London of his day, essentially repeats the same errors as the Pitt administration. Brothers ended his life with most of his followers deserting him (most to follow Joanna Southcott), in the care of a friend who could merely sit by and watch as the would-be Prince of the Hebrews ceaselessly described a future hope which was destined to remain utterly thwarted.

That's not quite the end of Brothers' story, however. The millenarian mood which gripped Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, partly motivated by the same kind of economic and political discontent we may discern in Brothers' early writings, bore fruit later in the century in the form of the fledgling Christian Socialism movement. Even if his own vision of the New Jerusalem failed to correct the injustices of his contemporary society, Brothers millenarian zeal helped to fuel the conviction that the promises of Christianity pointed to the urgent need to reform the nation so that, so to speak "We may build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land."

But that's a story for another day (notably one in which I've done a lot more research!)

My Chemical Apocalypse

Is everyone OK? Are we all still here? Nobody has found themselves suddenly being catapulted into the sky as they drive down the M1?

To the vast majority of people, it will come as absolutely no surprise that the predictions of Harold Camping that the Rapture would occur at 6pm on 21st May 2011 didn't quite pan out into reality. After all, in our recent memories, the omens have been detcted on the horizon portending the world's end. This can be expressed in religious terms (as in Camping's predictions), or as the revival and distortion of earlier generations' prophetic activity (c.f. Nostradamus) or indeed as a technological apocalypse (as in the feared "Y2K" or "millennium" bug). Society and culture (at least in the Western world) truly has eschatology (or, to use a less jargonistic term, events, theories or expressions relating to 'the End' or 'end times', from the Greek adjective eschatos meaning "last" or "latter") on the brain.

Camping's specific method of determining the date of the apocalypse, namely extrapolating dates from numerical information contained within the Bible and calculating a date, is not necessarily all that new. The Enlightenment saw an explosion of activity scrutinising biblical prophetic texts such as the books of Daniel and Revelation and attempting to find contained within the biblical text God's "plan" for contemporary history. One such influential study of the Apocalypse (the book, not the event) was Joseph Mede's Clavis Apocalyptica (published in English in 1643 as Key of the Revelation Searched and Demonstrated), but he wasn't the only one to try and map the cycles of destruction outlined in Revelation onto the events of history. Even Isaac Newton (yes, he of the 'proving gravity exists' fame) got in on the act, with his Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John being published after his death in 1733. Harold Camping, on the face of things, stands in a long tradition.

His specific focus on the Rapture too, has a long tradition within biblical interpretation. Based upon a number of New Testament texts (e.g. Matthew 24:40-41; Mark 13:27; I Thessalonians 4:16-17), believers in the Rapture expect that at the beginning of the End, God will save a number of his most faithful believers by "rapturing them" or suddenly collecting them up into heaven, whilst those on Earth will face the tribulations of the world's final days (in the book of Revelation this is predicted to last for 1000 years: Revelation 20:4-5). This doctrine has its roots as far back as the 17th Century, but was most famously expressed in English the 1800s by John Nelson Darby (part of the Plymouth Brethren and the founder of modern Dispensationalism) and Edward Irving (founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church) who were in turn influenced by a Chilean Jesuit Manuel Lacunza who died in 1801. Their predictions that God was bringing history into its last stages have been enormously influential in setting the tone of the religious discourse which Harold Camping's predictions participate in.

On the face of it, the failure of the eschaton to materialise ought to mean the end for Camping. And, indeed, we may well ask why we haven't just given up on this notion of a Rapture and the End of the world given that it has been debunked and has failed to come to pass time and time again? There are a number of possible answers to this. Firstly, some eschatological/messianic movements do just die out (Richard Brothers spent his final days in an insane asylum drawing plans and making flags for the New Jerusalem which all but his most ardent followers had given up hope for).

Secondly, after the initial disappointment of a prophecy's failure, attention can turn to why it didn't come to pass. Answers to these questions can be abundant. The prophet can be deemed to be a false prophet (plenty of those are predicted as coming in the end times, just look at Mark 13:22), or the failure for judgement to occur can be a sign that the believing brethren weren't quite pure or faithful enough: it is their failure, not God's.

Thirdly, as I have indicated, this idea that the world will be brought to an end by God is deeply imbued into the biblical text. Those who read the Bible with even the slightest bit of literal-mindedness can't escape the idea that time and time again, we can expect a cataclysmic final judgement, replete with natural disasters before the inception of a New Heaven and a New Earth to be created. And there is something enormously attractive about the idea that God has written into the pages of a book a plan which can help individuals and communities who feel alienated from what they perceive as the corrupt and sinful world around them. God has a plan, and their (often self-proclaimed) status as 'the Elect' means they're going to skip the horror and the torment that will befall the rest of humanity. When you factor in that mindset, it's perhaps completely unsuprising why individuals who claim they can peek beneath the divine wrapping paper keep gaining such popularity despite the long, long history of failure of such predictive activity.

Anyway, all of this strikes me as a little amusing as one of the songs I've recently been listening to on repeat is My Chemical Romance's Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na). In the context of the album which tells the story of a resistance movement (the Fabulous Killjoys) against the evil Better Living Industries, the lines

And right here, right now
All the way in Battery City
Little children raise their open filthy palms
Like tiny daggers up to heaven
And all the Juvi halls and the ritalin rats
As angels made from neon and fucking garbage scream out
"What will save us?"
And the sky opened up...

Strike me as a beautifully evocative cry for "apocalypse now". The cry of the dispossessed and the outcast being answered from the heavens. More importantly, it indicates that apocalypse and eschatology is never far from the cultural zeitgeist; the final words of the song are, after all "pull this pin, let this world explode".

Boat Race? Bah! Humbug!

I think one of the fundamental problems with being in Oxford as long as I have (seven and a half years and counting) is that it is very easy for cynicism to sap away at one's naive enthusiasm about the university and its institutions. A case in point, yesterday, an underdog Oxford crew powered to victory over Cambridge in the annual Boat Race.

Prefacing all of this with a caveat: I am of course aware that getting a place in the first boat is a tremendous achievement, requiring a level of commitment, endurance and tenacity that I frankly fail to summon up most days in the library. Similarly, the few Blues rowers that I have met have all been pleasant, nice, and down-to-earth people who have to balance a punishing training regime with all the commitments a degree at Oxford inflicts. I honestly don't know how they manage it. What follows is in fact unconnected to the teams that row in the race.

Putting that aside for a second, though, there are reasons why I can't get as excited about Oxford winning this year's race as I might have done in the past. Firstly, I'm a little uncomfortable at the fact that the boat race is one of the most visible and well-known spectacles that the two universities are involved in. For a great number of people, one of the only concrete images that come to mind when either 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge' is mentioned is the boat race. Sadly, rowing is also seen as one of the more genteel sports, an opinion which is perhaps reinforced by BBC coverage of this year's race which at one point highlighted the fact that Oriel College had ostensibly taken over a Thames-side pub to watch the race. One could argue this is no different to a group of local football supporters all converging on a pub to watch a match. I would counter, however, that very few such groups of supporters would fork out to have a team banner displayed over the front of the building.

Secondly, the very moniker of "the" boat race is somewhat questionable and masks a deep inequality. There isn't just one race. The reserve crews also race, as do the women's crews on the following day. This latter race, however, is not seen, remaining untelevised and largely unsponsored. Thus far, there's nothing here which doesn't mirror the inequality seen in other areas of the sporting world, where womens' sport remains largely ignored and unsupported. What is disturbing, however, is that to buy the equipment and fund the training for the women's boat, the participants themselves have to pay upwards of £1,500 out of their own pocket to make up for the dearth in sponsorship and external revenue sources (this latter point comes to me via anecdotal evidence - I would be delighted if anyone more in the know were able to dispel this evidence!). To put that in context, that's more than a term's rent which the university's elite female rowers have to raise simply so that they may take their place on the team. Whilst alumni, current students and even vaguely interested passers-by flock to the river to catch a glimpse of the men's crews drifting by, the women's boat is supported only by those in the know: friends, relatives and (I would sincerely hope) the men's crews.

The more I continue with this line of argument, the more I re-raise my fears of turning into Blake's miserable Urizen so I won't go any further. Suffice to say that the longer one stays in the same place, the harder it is to retain a sense of optomistic idealism about it. Oxford is no exception. It isn't difficult to unearth examples of the worrying inequalities which pervade this university. The University is constantly castigated in the media for them (occasionally justifiably, occasionally frivolously). The Boat Race is one of the few times when our presence on the nation's TV screens is set apart from such debates as our intake and the progression of academics within the institution. Yet even the University's highest-profile sporting event, if we look hard enough, betrays some of the same disparities which prevent Oxford from being an academic utopia of fairness.

The key lesson here is probably not to look hard, isn't it?

Blake, Urizen and Empire

Blake's depiction of Urizen from the First Book of Urizen, Plate 23, is one of my favourite illustrations in the whole of Blake's illustated prophecies. Luckily, the print is on display in the excellent Romantics exhibition in the Tate Britain gallery in London. Urizen is one of the more tragic figures in Blake. In many ways the character is conceived as a parody of enlightenment, rationalist thinking, being constantly presented in isolation, poring over his books in abject misery. He is also, however, Blake's symbol of repressive legalism and a pastiche of the "creator" God found in such biblical passages as Genesis 2-3. In many of Blake's works, he is cast as the villain of the piece, mercilessly persecuting his adversaries or indeed those under his control (as, memorably, in The Four Zoas). The point Blake is making, is that rationalist thinking, far from liberating humanity through a scientific understanding of the world, actually enslaves through the restriction of imagination and inspiration. That is not to say that reason has no place in Blake's image of redeemed humanity. Rather, Urizen is a tragic figure because his attempts at creation are in essence divine because they are inspired and creative, but become fallen and repressive by Urizen's desire to dominate the other facets of human personality.

For me, this illustration firmly underscores the inherent tragedy in Blake's presentation of Urizen. The red, spiky orb which he carries with him is possibly the world, corrputed by his cold rationalism. Pushing wearily at the edge of the painting, Urizen's eyes behold the lion in the bottom right of the picture. At a number of points, the Lion represents for Blake the notion of empire ("For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease." - America, Plate 6, Line 15). And in The Four Zoas, Urizen creates the oppressive and exploitative "Universal Empire". Yet in this picture, Urizen looks down at the lion, and yet empire simply can't meet his gaze. Urizen's campaign to understand and to rationalise the world alienates him from the very concepts and structures he is responsible for. The life of the rationalist (and, indeed the God of creation) is one doomed to loneliness and isolation.

It's a fairly worrying fate to consider. Especially as I currently write this sitting in the Bodleian library, with books spread out in front of me, and the beautiful sunshine of an Oxford spring day lying frustratingly beyond a closed, blinded window. Is it any wonder that I feel nothing but sympathy for poor Urizen?

Does Divinity = Humanity in Blake?

I think I'm at my first major crossroads in my thinking about Blake (beyond the whole issue of, well, understanding what's going on - a process which is far from complete). I'm putting the finishing touches to a piece of work I have completed on the connections between The Four Zoas and the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22. The basic sift of the material I'm fairly happy with, and it has produced some exciting results, especially when the marginalia and Blake's revisions to the text are taken in to account. Rather, I'm struggling with a problem which is at the heart sentences I have produced like this:

"The successive failures of history and contemporary societal movements to effect apocalypse and redemption lead Blake to emphasise all the more strongly that Jerusalem is to be experienced as a transcendental, divine gift."

One of the most difficult things I'm trying to get my ahead around is whether Blake ever really has a theology of transcendence. In the final stages of the poem's revisions, Blake cites John 17:21-23 on the first page of the poem. These words, on a certain reading, essentially state that due to the connections forged between God, Jesus and the disciples, the three take on one identity, and when humanity makes this leap of faith "they may become completely one", meaning that intra-human divisions will be erased, as well as the distinction between humanity and divinity.

How far, for Blake is the "Divine Body" in every man (E663), or how far is it an objective, external reality (as, arguably, it is in orthodox Christian thinking)? If it's the latter, then sentences like mine above aren't problematic, although they do point to a pessimism on Blake's part vis a vis humanity's ability to ever effect on its own the "Universal Brotherhood" the Four Zoas strives towards. If it is the former, however, then speaking of a "transcendental" gift is surely a nonsense, since Jesus is essentially the paradigmatic example of perfect humanity. The power to become him is in all of us, so to speak.

All of this is fairly important because I would like to present The Four Zoas as reflecting the passivity of the vision in Revelation 21-22. John "sees" the New Jerusalem descending from heaven; he doesn't build it himself (like Richard Brothers tried to do). 

In conclusion: gah.

For The Sexes

I've been somewhat remiss in posting at the moment, namely because I'm trying to prepare an essay on The Four Zoas as part of my submission for my end-of-first-year exam. Except it's not quite an exam. It's more like an interview. A microcosm of the viva in which I'll eventually defend my completed DPhil, I suppose. Anyway, I'm busy writing that, and when it's done and torn to pieces by my advisor, I'll share more about it. In the meantime, this particular poem has really helped to distract me from the complex allegory of Zoas. It's the Prologue to a series of engravings Blake completed entitled For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise and it follows Blake's usual theme of railing against religion which exalts and imposes rigid legalism on its adherents. It's a rather similar complaint I have against modern Christianity (although Blake was able to hold on to his faith, whereas mine well and truly lapsed). Sadly, for Blake "legalism" often seems to get interpreted as the Mosaic law: for me, Blake is very much a supercessionist rather than a dual-covenant type of theologian (I think, those more versed in the finer points of Blake's attitude to Judaism/Hebrew Bible are more than welcome to prove me wrong on that point) which I find a bit of a shame. But anyway, in lieu of something actually substantial, here it is!

Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice
Such are the Gates of Paradise
Against the Accusers chief desire
Who walkd among the Stones of Fire
Jehovahs Finger Wrote the Law
Then Wept! then rose in Zeal & Awe
And the Dead Corpse from Sinais heat
Buried beneath his Mercy Seat
O Christians Christians! tell me Why
You rear it on your Altars high

Presenting at the Forum

Apologies for the delay in posting, the past few weeks have been rather hectic with work and general "life admin". I've been inspired to get back on the blogging horse by an event I participated in last night, the Trinity College MCR/SCR Forum (in past years the words "for Intellectual Exchange" were tagged on to all of that).

The event was designed to bring senior fellows (tenured academics) together with current graduate students to share their research. The nature of the collegiate system at Oxford meant that this was a truly interdisciplanry affair, the talk I had volunteered to give was sandwiched between an account of a Coptic Monk's account of the Arab Invasion of Egypt in the 7th and 8th centuries CE, and a discussion of NATO's strategy (or, as the speaker argued, the lack of strategy) in the Afghanistan War.

That environment and audience presented its own challenge. When we're trapped in our academic bubbles, certain terms are used so frequently that it's easy to forget that there's no reason why anyone else should know what they mean. In truth, it's rather difficult to give a presentation and talk on Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers without letting terms like "apocalyptic", "eschatological" and "prophetic" slip in unexplained. The event therefore was a very good exercise in thinking outside of my academic comfort zone and making sure I was able to convey the central tenets of their message and theology in a way which was accessible. Hopefully I succeeded in that, and a room of people went away knowing a little more about these two fascinating figures than they did when they came in.

What was truly valuable about the experience was the feedback and comments I received from the audience. It was a very eclectic bunch of people. There were medical students, experts in French literature and midwifery in the 16th century, historians of Birmingham in the 19th century, Classics students and everything else in between. I learned of a number of possible medical/gynaecological explanations for Joanna's miraculous pregnancy; the difficulties of using modern medical diagnoses such as "manic depression" or "bipolar disorders" to explain away the types of prophetic activity exhibited by Brothers and Southcott; and that the term "Southcottian" was used as a form of invective against social reformers in Birmingham 20 years after Joanna had died. For me, it reaffirmed the value of taking your research outside of the walls of your department. When you allow other minds from other disciplines to access your research, you don't simply receive a list of factual questions you feel obliged to answer; you receive useful, insightful feedback from perspectives you yourself are not qualified or trained to view your subject from. All in all, it was a very inspiring evening.

And yet, if I were to open the window of the room we were in, stick my head out and turn 90 degrees, I would perhaps be able to catch a glimpse of the Sheldonian Theatre. I wonder if the discussions which were taking place inside it would mean that such events and opportunities were only going to be accessible to a wealthy, privileged minority in the years to come.