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Blake's Idea of Brotherhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Michael Ferber
Michael Ferber*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Abstract

Despite its place in the French Revolutionary motto, fraternity lacks a literature. Blake, who makes an important contribution toward that literature, draws largely from the New Testament, which offers two grounds for brotherhood: we are sons of the Father, we are brothers in Christ. Suspicious of transcendent gods, Blake develops only the latter concept. We are in essence brotherly beings; unfraternal behavior is death. Brotherhood is not kindliness, however, but “wars of love” for one another and willing self-sacrifice. “Atonement” only makes matters worse. The New Testament Christian fraternity rests on Paul's dualism; Blake agrees to the extent that “nature” (and woman) threatens brotherly love. Yet women can be brothers, too, despite the misogynist symbolism Blake chooses to inherit.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 3 , May 1978 , pp. 438 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 Wilson Carey McWilliams has recently taken a step toward remedying the neglect in The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973). For his account of the omission and possible reasons for it, see pp. 2-5. In the new five-volume Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribners, 1973), there is neither article nor index entry for either brotherhood or fraternity.

2 All Blake quotations are from the fourth edition of David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), abbreviated E herein. Further abbreviations: FZ for The Four Zoas, J for Jerusalem, M for Milton, MHH for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, VDA for Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

3 See Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans. F. W. Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922), pp. 22-30 and 103-04, n. 7, for the history of this idea. See also 1 Cor. xii.12. An interesting variant occurs in Eph. iv.25: “We are members one of another.”

4 All biblical quotations are from the King James Version. “Adoption” (huiothesia) is translated “sonship” in the Revised Standard Version.

5 McWilliams, p. 4.

6 Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Moscow: Foreign Language Press, 1939), p. 6. This is my translation; I owe the citation to Nancy Schwartz.

7 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947; rpt. New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 135.

8 I am developing an idea I owe to Irene Tayler.

9 Cannot be saved qua Elect, that is. There is always the possibility of seeing the light and ceasing to be Elect. The Elect is a “state,” not an individual.

10 Man's Hope (L'Espoir), passim. Malraux's fraternity, of course, is a product of the Spanish civil war, and to the extent that it depends on hatred of a common enemy Blake would reject it. It is easy enough to dismiss Blake as a deluded utopian along the lines of Marx's sarcastic debunking of the 1848 slogan of fraternité as the “imaginary abolition of class relations,” which, in Lamartine's priceless phrase, had been based on “a terrible misunderstanding” (The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850, trans. Paul Jackson, in Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin; London: New Left Review, 1973], p. 47). Class solidarity is possible; fraternity is a dream. Yet the mistake, surely, is to confuse the real with the ideal and announce the arrival of utopia, not to maintain an ideal utopia as a measure of the real. Whatever he may have thought about the means, Marx believed that the end of class solidarity is the classless society, and so in his way did Blake. I would add that, even if a Marxist found Blake's universalist thrust unassimilable to his own theory of revolution, he might still find Blake's ideas partly translatable into a phenomenology of revolutionary groups. See, for example, Sartre's use of Malraux's “apocalypse” in his account of the fusion of the Parisians in 1789 (Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith [London: New Left Books, 1976], p. 357).

11 McWilliams, p. 8 and passim.

12 The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (1953; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1961), pp. 89-90.

13 David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 57, 515.