The ‘Binding Briars’ of the Church: William Blake’s Projection of a Parasitic Priesthood Dependent on the Repressed Desires of Man–Anna Wilkinson

The relationship between repressed desire and the creation of institution is explored throughout the works of Michel Foucault. In his book The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that once a strict system of laws or rules is enacted within an institution, this system draws out the desires and “peculiarities over which it kept watch” (1664). Not only do the desires become more appealing to some once they are deemed as wrong, but this newly judicial system condemns an energy or thought that was before rendered normal within society. They are almost “forcing [natural desires] into hiding so as to make possible their discovery” (The History of Sexuality 1662). Because of the zeal that both the church and the state put into creating these repressive laws, it appears they would rather “increase [their] opportunities for intervention” than create a healthy environment in which man can live (“Michel Foucault” 1619). By dismissing man’s natural desire, the institutions of church and state have created power for themselves in a system they can control. Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish that the disciplinary laws the state established have only “inculcated docility and produced delinquency” (1642). Instead of controlling what the state has deemed as undesirable and unlawful actions, they are only increasing and encouraging these illegal behaviors by trying to extinguish them. This leads to eventual dependency on the crimes in order for the institution to have something left to correct.

William Blake explores the same notion as applied to the priests and doctrine of the Christian Church. He reveals institutionalized religion’s attempt to control man’s natural energies as dependent on the existence of man’s repressed desires in both “The Garden of Love“and “The Human Abstract.” Instead of the “Garden of Love” appearing as a fruitful place of joy and reproduction, the garden serves as dark and barren graveyard for sinful desires that seemingly work against the laws of the church. Both the chapel in the center of the garden and the priests that the speaker encounters seem to advertise a growing sense of prohibition that has enveloped the garden. The Church gates “were shut” with “Thou shalt not writ over the door” as the priests continued “walking their rounds” of the garden turned graveyard (5-6, 11). Continuing with his play on the garden image, Blake uses “The Human Abstract” to illuminate the type of garden that the priest craft has grown inside the human mind to replace the original, visible garden of life and passionate energy. Just as the priests serve as the only life in the barren and dying garden of love and desire, in “The Human Abstract,” the priests’ lives also seem dependent on the death of man’s natural energies and the growth of his corrupted desires. By planting and tending their own tree in man’s brain, the priests have taken “advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract…mental deities from their objects” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 290). Here, instead of allowing desire as an equal to reason, the Church is making man’s natural desires sinful in order to make their subjects feel guilty for the desires they are experiencing and eventually force them into religion. As an institution, they are teaching man to value reason over desire, putting the two into an unhealthy system of negation, where no balance between the two forces can occur. By doing so, the priests are imposing their rational and reasonable ideologies on to man and trying to demonize his natural desires. Not only has the Church corrupted the concept of desire by prohibiting it outright, but as a result, its survival has become dependent on the manifestation and indeed cultivation of the desires they profess to oppose.

Blake begins his antagonistic approach to the Edenic garden image in “The Garden of Love.” The speaker is automatically repressed by the Church’s prohibition because upon his arrival to the garden, the Chapel gates are shut and “Thou shalt not” is written over the doorframe (5-6). The Chapel, what should be a place of openness and renewal, has shut itself off from the world. When the speaker travels out to the garden, a place usually associated with growth and rebirth, it is “filled with graves” instead of fruitful plants (9). All of the reproduction and celebration of life has been killed. The impending image of death is again echoed by the priests clothed in

“black gowns” (11). Rather than a chapel and a garden of love and fruitfulness, the speaker sees images of death and a funeral procession. Perhaps the funeral imagery is implied for the desires the priests have tried to kill, but by the priests representing the only life present in what was once a garden of love, Blake is introducing the parasitical role of the priest class as well. Not only are the priests being nourished by what they are killing, but this process is essential for their survival. Like parasitic plants and vines, the priests attempt to “bind” the speaker’s “joys and desire” with their “briars” of religious reason (12). Instead of desire coexisting with reason as spiritual righteousness and fervor, desire has become suffocated by a religious negation. This subjugation of desire to reason is a violation of what Blake calls contraries. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake shows that two opposing concepts should be in a system of “contraries” for full understanding and progression to result (288). If one contrary becomes valued over or controls another, both concepts become part of an unhealthy negation. When reason begins to contain energy or desire, it begins to kill the body because “energy is the only life” during human existence (Marriage 288). The Church, in its attempt to contain desires, only pushes the desires out in other directions and re-channels them. The Church thinks that jailing people for their supposed sinful desires will result in ultimate good for the imprisoned when, in fact, “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion” (Marriage 289). By creating strict institutions that limit and condemn man’s natural desires, both systems of law and organized religion have empowered criminals and whores by trying to stifle existing desires and, as a result, re-channeling them.

Blake attempts to show this redirection in the “charter’d” streets of “London” (1). By using the term “charter,” the poet seemingly recognizes the visible re-channeling through each individual street, perhaps hinting at other chartering internally. In Michael Ferber’s discussion of “London” with its surrounding context, he establishes the possibility of a dual meaning behind Blake’s specific word choice. Ferber argues that “London [the city] had a charter, granting it certain privileges or liberties” (312). Not only does this apply to the state itself, but more importantly, to London’s people. Literally, the people are “‘hired’ or ‘leased’” (Ferber 312) to certain jobs within the city and on London’s very streets, but figuratively, the institutions of the church and the state have leased liberty and freedom of desire. They have chartered and channeled man’s desire in attempt to control these energies. Instead, the people’s bodies, emotions, and minds are “mapped, bound, [and] confined, by being turned into,” or treated like, “a street…rather than…taking [their] natural course” (Ferber 313). An example of these

forced tensions exists in “London” as the Church supports the physical lease of the adolescent chimney sweepers’ bodies. They ironically claim to be “appall[ed]” and horrified at the young “Chimney-sweepers cry” (9-10). While it seems at first that the Church is deeply shocked and concerned by the anguish of these child laborers, the Church is actually using them to “appall” or whiten and clean their own dirty chimneys. The color of the clean church becomes the ironic opposite of its morality. As the stains of impurity are removed from the church walls, the church as a moral institution is stained by their own lack of integrity and religiosity as they promote social injustice by hiring mistreated children to work for them rather than protecting the children from this social atrocity. In the same way the church supports the injustice of child labor, it also seems essential in creating the “youthful Harlots” that curse the “Infants” and the “Marriage hearse”(18-20). When sexual pleasure is banned by religious ideology, the sexual desires of man are not extinguished. Instead, the Church has forced him to channel and charter this repressed energy into a way it can be dealt with. By convincing their followers that natural desires are sinful, the Church is establishing “mind forg’d manacles” concerning the dichotomy of religious right and wrong in human thought. Sexual desire is seen as sinful and animalistic by the Church, and men are condemned for having such lusts outside of recognized marital bonds. According to Ferber, it was impossible to “create virginal and virtuous brides ready to assume the roles expected of them…and not simultaneously create a large society of whores to provide what had to be left out” (330). Those that could not achieve this sexual satisfaction through marriage looked to young harlots to satisfy this desire. In a way, the Church’s institutionalization of marriage and decision of what marriage can and cannot be has partially caused the problem. Thus, the Church’s sexual prohibition created the prostitute’s profession. By trying to stifle natural desires, the Church has not extinguished them, but forced man to repress them. As a result of the Church’s ultimate goal to control the religious limitations of man’s desires, they have become dependent on these repressed energies for the church to survive as an institution.

Although this clerical dependency was originally unintentional, the continual effort to force certain virtues on members of the congregation led to both the reversal of these Godly virtues and the growth of an internal corruption of Christian doctrine. Blake’s “The Divine Image” seemingly promotes optimism and encouragement as the “virtues of delight” that the Church teaches are analyzed (3). These qualities, “Mercy Pity Peace and Love,” work together to create the divine human form that is God (4). In his detailed analysis of “The Divine Image” in relation to “The Human Abstract,” Robert Gleckner explores what Blake is implying when he writes “all must love the human form” (“The Divine Image” 17). Gleckner points out that “in the world of innocence,” this form must be praised as a whole. Each individual virtue the Church teaches must work with the

others to create the complete “human form divine” (15). Though this notion of the divine human image is what the Church is trying to promote, it is impossible in the “world of experience” because “the imaginative unity is shattered, for the Blakean fall [of man]…is a fall into division, fragmentation” (Gleckner 374). The ultimate divine virtues the priests are teaching would, in a world of innocence and purity, successfully work together to make the divine human image complete. However, in a fallen world, this is impossible because each of these virtues becomes separated from the whole for it must also be accompanied by its sinful counterpart, vice. Gleckner argues that in a fallen world, “virtue cannot exist except as a rationally conceived opposite to vice” (374). For Blake, the priest class claims innocence in teaching virtue, but in the reality of the fallen world, they are only comparing qualities they deem acceptable next to the desires they are working to condemn. Despite their claims of innocence and virtue, the priests themselves are not devoid of the desires they condemn as vice. Blake even argues that while “the Priests of the Raven of dawn…with hoarse note curse the sons of joy,” they, in “pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not” (Marriage 294). At best, they are hypocrites; as religious leaders, they condemn their followers for wrong-doing, but hide their own similar sinful thoughts behind the guise of religious virtue and righteousness. Forcing these supposedly Christian virtues that the priests pretend to embody into action, the priests have unintentionally developed a need for vice in order for the virtue they preach to exist. Posing as the opposite to “The Divine Image,” “The Human Abstract” explores how this concept is perverted by the priests. The first eight lines of the poem work to show how there would be no need for the virtues the priests are teaching if they had not labeled man’s natural desires as vice. Pity is unveiled when Gleckner claims that within “The Human Abstract” it is “manufactured by man in his blind egomania by creating an object for that pity; and mercy is spawned by a condition calculated to elicit its moral force” (376). These virtues that the priests preach to boast of goodness and Godliness have become dependent on the vices they refute.

Creating a clerical system that feeds from the hidden desires of its subjects, Blake establishes a parasiticclass within the Church, which he illustrates vividly in “The Garden of Love” as well as “The Human Abstract.” Not only does Blake continue the garden imagery, but the priests that were watching and encouraging the death of the garden of love, now emerge in the specific parasitic roles of the caterpillar, fly, and raven. Whereas in the garden the priests represented a plant-like parasite, winding around and suffocating man’s “joys and desires,” in “The Human Abstract” they take on more intentional and animalistic roles as they feed on man’s desires. All three creatures representing the priest-class encourage a corrupted notion of virtue and a mystified sense of religion to bear the “fruit of Deceit” in the minds of their followers from which the parasites feed (17). The Church is deceiving man into thinking that only the repressive ideologies of the Church are true, and that all natural desires are bad. Here, the Biblical image of the tree in the Garden of Eden has almost been reversed. Man was subject to his pure and natural desires before he was fed the “fruit of Deceit” by the Church or priesthood, creating a parallel between laws of religious institutions and Satan. As parasitic caterpillars and flies, the priests feed on the mystery that they have created in the man’s brain. Just as the man accepts the corrupted tree to grow in his mind, men of the church allow priests to tell them what to think as well. Man’s “natural instincts and processes” have been perverted by the Church’s teaching of “the god of this world and his iron-clad ‘Thou shalt nots’” that guarded the chapel in “The Garden of Love” (Gleckner 379). These internal projections of religious, and often social, institutions onto man are the same deceptive “mind-forg’d manacles” Blake warns against in “London” (8). The Church has imposed their ideologies into man’s mind, and in the same way they suppressed his overt natural desires in “The Garden of Love,” they try to suppress his desire to question by filling his mind with their fruit of religious dogma.

Although these stifling mechanisms of the church and state are to blame for deceiving man, the largest blame, Gleckner would argue, should be placed on man himself. The real problem lies in “man’s own thinking processes, his refusal to acknowledge the growth in his own skull, [and] his all too willing assumption that it lay only in the skulls of others” (379). Blake is fighting against such blind acceptance of religious authority at the end of “The Divine Image” when he equates multiple religions: “all must love the human form,/ In heathen, turk, or jew” (17-18). He directly attacks repressive ideologies of the Church when he shows that God can and is dwelling in them all and not just the supposed Christians (19-20). Echoing this directly, is Blake’s passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell claiming that “All deities reside in the human breast” (290). He shows that religion is an internal projection that man has to develop and discover himself. In a way, Blake uses the Angel to represent institutionalized religion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and to show how man can be talked into accepting corrupted reason over truth. At one point, the Angel imposes a certain vision of Hell onto man, and it is only after man has been separated from the Angel that he can see Hell clearly and impose his opinion back onto the Angel (291-2). By gaining this clarity both visually and mentally, the man is able to distinguish not only his personal perception of the surrounding situation, but also to recognize the distorted truth he was initially presented by the Angel. Eynel Wardi explores this message of self-capability, or empowerment, in Blake as he discusses and analyzes the text of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He argues this text alone “celebrates the imaginative possibility of provisionally…overcoming limits and limitations of sense-perception as well as of tyrannical conceptions that narrow, divide, and rigidify the fallen mind” (253). While Blake is not rejecting religion, he uses the Angel to call attention to man’s blind acceptance of religious ideologies of repression. He is showing that man must step back from them to observe a situation for himself instead of accepting the Church’s refusal of desire. The true Hell is only seen when the man relies on his own self-perception.

In Stuart Peterfreund’s discussion of Blake, he argues that many of the characters in Blake’s poetic works all face the same inability to develop their own thoughts concerning the world around them. Just as the man could not clearly see Hell until he was away from the Angel’s overpowering presence, many other Blakean characters face the similar “failure to attain the realization that the kingdom of heaven lies within” (Peterfreund 107). This process of internal analysis for external situations can only take place in the mind. In the same way, Blake argues the tree in “The Human Abstract” was formed by the repressive “mind forg’d manacles” of the priest-class, but also, like the man in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is ultimately man’s responsibility to search out religious truths for himself. Failing to do so makes man subject to the power of the institutions that surround him. If the man in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell refused to acknowledge that this advocate for his religion was giving him a tainted view of reality, he could have been subject to the same tree of “Mystery” and “fruit of Deceit” from “The Human Abstract” that the priest-class grows in another follower’s brain. In the same way the Angel imposed his view of Hell onto the human spectator and the priests imposed their policy of virtue on man’s brain, Blake would argue that all institutionalized religions impose their system of virtues and condemn natural desires in order to have something to correct. If they make the desires sinful or unlawful, the church has given itself more authority to change the natural condition that exists in man, but also, in the process, has developed a dependency on the condition’s existence altogether. Institutions, both of church and state, seemingly have been erected on man’s desires. While they intend to punish unfavorable actions, Foucault argues that violations of the institution’s laws, or “delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn” (“The Carceral” 1642). When the church prohibits man’s natural desires and the state prohibits his actions, they are only promoting his disobedience: “The delinquent is an institutional product” (“The Carceral” 1642). The hypocrisy of this unnecessary repression shows that “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with/ bricks of Religions” because institution is built upon the very desires it condemns.

Works Cited

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            and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996. 280. Print.

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—. The History of Sexuality. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent

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