Synagogues of Satan: Blake on “Hipocritic Holiness”

English poet and engraver William Blake diagnosed the human problem in the following way: from the wholeness and totality of objects we abstract the two qualities of ‘Good and Evil’ and doing so slay all the granular detail of the ‘minute particulars’ of existence. We use these abstractions to perform and justify the destruction of concrete individuals and the enslavement and oppression of human persons. What is worse, most of us have no idea that this is what we are doing for a fish, alas, can’t see water. Blake’s radical critique of human life and human society is that self-righteousness is that final nail in the coffin of ‘self-hood’, a state he persistently labels ‘Satanic’. Self-hood is the ego in its defensive and self-limiting mode which either views the other as an enemy and a threat to be nullified by either passive or active aggression or absorbed by erotic fusion (sex as a weapon to quote Pat Benatar!). Good and evil and the gap between them are the final articulation of this atomized conception of self. Good people, or as Blake calls them ‘The Elect’ are deeper in this trap than anyone else: they are the primary victims (and yes they are, as all of us, victims of psychic processes they cannot comprehend or control) of the will to self-righteousness. This will is a will to isolation and separation on the basis of an abstracted quality that distorts the underlying substance. Self-righteousness refuses the truth of brotherhood and charity. It refuses human wholeness. Self-righteousness refuses agape as it prefers an abstract moralism, a clear separation of pure and impure, to identification in love. It refuses to distinguish between states (i.e. the level of evolved consciousness attained by a particular person at a given point of time) and the individuals suffering but also growing in those states.

For this reason Blake will shock us, almost beyond the Gospels, in his doctrine of forgiveness of sins and love and embrace of enemies no matter how recalcitrant they appear. As in Julian of Norwich there is no final judgment or final condemnation, only the conditional call to repentance and change of heart which is two-fold. First we condemn sin in ourselves and only then condemn it in the other. If we condemn it in the other this is a call to a better and higher life not an ‘accusation of sin’ for Satan is the ‘Triple Accuser’ and the voice of moralistic judgment who torments Job (in Blake's complex reading). It is Satan who is closed to agape, who rejects solidarity in the name of judgment according to the categories of good and evil. We might think that this spirit is only the problem of ‘others’ but this is in fact the very essence of the stance of self-righteousness. ‘Others’ are moralistic prigs not us! A quick check of Facebook and Twitter however reveals that these are, in Blake’s terms, the very synagogues of Satan in our era dealing as they do with swift and summary judgment, cancelling and swarming. It is clear that on social media we engage not in agape but in moral aggression: the use of moral categories to elevate self over other and to seal off the private ego from contamination by the ‘reprobate’. The ultimate result of this is verbal or even, in extreme cases physical violence (morality without agape is only violence) and if Blake is our teacher then there is not a side or party that is or CAN BE innocent of this. Is Blake a heretic or only a more radical follower of Jesus than any of the other great English poets? I leave the reader to decide.  
One final aside: as Rev. 3.9 (from which we get our title 'Synagogues of Satan') has some anti-Semitic history I must note that Blake, to my best recollection, never uses this phrase to refer to the Jewish people but only to the official Christian churches and to 'puritanism' in genenral. Blake was not notably anti-semitic for his place and time though anti-Jewish caricature does crop up in a couple of his less than prophetic moments.