Blakean Humanism: Romantic Messianism Democratized

When writing a particular life (Genet's, Flaubert's, even his own), Jean-Paul Sartre sifted his data for what he called, borrowing a term from Merleau-Ponty, the "differential": that which placed his subject out of step with the prevailing spirit or presumptions of his time and, as a consequence, permitted him to undertake a life-project that reflected the peculiar stamp of his individual consciousness. For Sartre, every life is filled with opportunities to step away from the drowse of "bad faith" that encumbers it and embark upon a career of existential authenticity.

In his difficult and challenging Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin theorized a Marxist historiography; whereas Sartre focused his biographies on specific individuals, Benjamin attempted to take in the sweep of history itself. And yet he, too, was in search of the "differential" that impregnated historical moments with "chips of Messianic time" (Addendum A): those historical junctures which presented historical actors with opportunities for revolutionary action. In Thesis XV, Benjamin wrote:

The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.

Likewise, the recognition of such moments in the course of sifting one's historical data presents the critical historian with the opportunity to salvage them from the ash-heap of the victor's narration about the past and, thereby, transform her scholarship into a mode of revolutionary praxis.

Hubert Babinski was correct to point out the "mystical messianism" or hero worship that, for better or worse (and usually worse), has afflicted Romantic sensibilities since they first came into their own as such in the late 18th-early 19th centuries C.E. This is, without question, one of the frailties to which the Romantic movement has always been heir. For some, the Mazeppa legend represents yet another iteration of this unfortunate tendency.

But not for the latter-day Mazeppist.

For the latter-day Mazeppist is, after the recent example of Northrop Frye, a Blakean humanist. That is to say, an individual who sees his/her own reflection in Harold Bloom's description of William Hazlitt, whose religious background, "like that of all the English Romantic poets ... was in the tradition of Protestant dissent, the kind of nonconformist vision that descended from the Left Wing of England's Puritan movement" (Bloom, The Visionary Company, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1971): xvii).

Bloom continued:

There is no more important point to be made about English Romantic poetry than this one, or indeed about English poetry in general, particularly since it has been deliberately obscured by most modern criticism. Though it is a displaced Protestantism, or a Protestantism astonishingly transformed by different kinds of humanism or naturalism, the poetry of the English Romantics is a kind of religious poetry, and the religion is in the Protestant line, though Calvin or Luther would have been horrified to contemplate it. Indeed, the entire continuity of English poetry that T. S. Eliot and his followers attacked is a radical Protestant or displaced Protestant tradition (ibid).

Like Benjamin, like Blake, the latter-day Mazeppist performs a variety of displaced Protestantism and, in the process, democratizes Romantic Messianism.

The "differential," the productive combination of longing and loss that the figure of Mazeppa represents, is not the franchise of an aristocratic few, but the birthright of the long-suffering many. For the Blakean humanist, the Mazeppa/Christ figure is a metonym for the proposition that every human soul carries within itself the capacity to emerge from the most unpromising of fates to take its seat within the "visionary company" of "seers"; those who have been gifted by their trials upon this earth with new eyes to recognize a given moment as a chip of Messianic time and with the revolutionary will to act upon it appropriately.

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

Hart Crane (of course).