The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word meaning "revelation", lending its name to the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelations. It refers to a prophetic vision which, through elaborate and often violent symbolism, signals the end of the present world and its inhabitants and, above all, is followed by a regeneration of the world to a perfect state. The violence and destruction that befalls the earth is cleansing, cleansing the earth of its evils and its evildoers, in preparation for the inauguration of Christ's kingdom on the earth. My aim is to explore this idea of ​​apocalypse through examining Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and discussing its social, political, historical, and poetic context. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Followers of millenarianism believe that once evil and the unjust are destroyed, there will be a thousand-year period of peaceful bliss on earth, the millennium, after which the forces of evil will be released to be banished forever. Three Ages philosophy refers to the belief that the apocalypse would follow one thousand years after the completion of the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Holy Spirit respectively. Adolf Hitler famously adhered to the theology of the Three Ages, believing that his Third Reich would bring glory to the world for a thousand years. Such images of destruction and major changes in the state of the world lend themselves easily to ideas of political revolution. By reading the apocalyptic books of the Bible one could read in them the promotion of the destruction of the status quo so that humanity's difficult situation is replaced by a new earth and a paradise is regained in it. This is immediately relevant to the Romantic poets who were inspired by the promise of the American Revolution, culminating in the election of George Washington as the first president of the United States of America in 1789, and by the more radical expectations raised by the early years of the French Revolution in same period. They saw the French Revolution as an opening towards the end of history, a harbinger of a new era of joy, of a return to Paradise. Given this context, and the revolution underway in England from a predominantly agricultural nation to a modern industrial nation, it is understandable why so many thought the social structure was on the brink of collapse and imminent apocalypse. The political revolution went hand in hand with the literary revolution, and Shelley in his Defense of Poetry describes how the literature of the time "has arisen as if from a new birth" and that an "electric life" burns in the works of the time ​which is "less their spirit than the spirit of the age", thus coining the term Spirit of the Age. William Hazlitt titled his book of essays The Spirit of the Age and in it argued that the early years of the French Revolution seemed to herald "the dawn of a new age" and claimed that "a new impulse had been given to the minds of men" , commenting that it was "a time of promise, of renewal of the world – and of letters". Wordsworth and Coleridge embodied this spirit when they revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry with their Lyrical Ballads of 1798. It is difficult for us to understand this spirit of fervor and anticipation of something truly great, as Robert Southey recognized, writing in 1824: " Few people, except those who lived there, can conceive or understand what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world it seemed to open to those who were just entering it Old things seemedpass and dreamed of nothing but the regeneration of the human race." In addition to poets, this biblical language of regeneration was taken up by preachers, such as Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Joseph Fawcett and Elhanan Winchester, who openly supported the Revolution, considering it a confirmation of the biblical prophecy. William Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in the early 1790s during the early years of the French Revolution. At this point it still promised much, and Blake had high expectations of the universal violence it would lead to. inauguration of the Kingdom of Christ. Opening The Argument (plate 2, line 1) with “Rintrah,” which Morton D. Paley believes “embodies…the prophetic wrath of the righteous man,” Blake immediately places his work in line with the biblical prophets Elijah of the Old Testament and John the Baptist, who recounts the prophecy of the Apocalypse in the Apocalypse. The idea of ​​the poet himself as a prophet is presented to us in the introduction to the poem on plate 3, where Blake mentions Swedenborg, the. whose most famous work was entitled A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell, and his prediction that the Messiah would return in 1757, the year of Blake's birth. At the time of composing this poem Blake was thirty-three years old, the same age as Jesus when he was resurrected, and sees himself as the imaginative poet-prophet who will bring redemption through this work, through the marriage of "Antonyms" to "progression" . Among these he cites "Reason and Energy" as "necessary for human existence" which he elaborates as ""Good being the passive that obeys Reason, Evil is the active that arises from Energy. Good is heaven. Evil is hell." And it is through their marriage that the millennium will occur. He refers the reader to Isaiah XXXIV and XXXV which prophesy "the day of the Lord's vengeance" and the subsequent redemption of the earth when "the wilderness and the dry land will rejoice; and the wilderness shall rejoice and blossom like the rose", respectively. It also mentions Edom; the place from which the holy avenger is stained with blood in Isaiah LXIII and prophesies the redemption of Adam and the recovery of Paradise. In the historical context of All' early 1790s this nation of Edom comes to represent France with the figure of the avenging saint, a manifestation of the French Revolution; in Blake's eyes the sign of apocalyptic regeneration and Paradise regained. Blake aligns himself with Milton, who Blake claims "was a true poet and of the devil's party without knowing it" in plate 6. If the Apocalypse is a revelation, an unveiling, then Blake's marriage of heaven and hell is apocalyptic in its very nature against any absolutism in religion questioning how separate good and evil are and confusing the roles of Jesus and Satan Blake states that "in Paradise lost...the Governor or Reason is called Messiah", that is, Jesus, "but in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is called Satan" since it is he who acts as the moral accuser and physical tormentor. Blake argues that if they can share roles, how can the absolutism preached by the orthodox religion exist? Further similarities between Christ and Satan are highlighted, such as the Devil rebelling against authority, challenging God, and being expelled from Heaven, while on Earth Jesus rebelled against the Pharisees who he believed oppressed Him and His people. The Devil asks, “Didn’t he mock the Sabbath?” thus demonstrating that Jesus questioned the status quo because it was too restrictive. He also didn't "turn the law away from the woman caught in adultery" because of the hypocrisy and oppressive nature of the law? Both Satan and Jesus have acted as revolutionaries in the past and this not only supports the argumentof Blake against absolutism in religion, but also in demonstrating that revolution is not necessarily evil. He also parodies Swedenborg, whom he once admired, for being a "conventional angel in the disguise of a radical devil". He also felt alienated by the growing institutionalization of the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem and by some of its controversial writings on what Paley calls "the concubinage dispute" which sanctioned the use of concubines by men in certain circumstances but not that of women, perhaps referenced in the line “Brothels [are built] with the bricks of religion.” He reverses many of Swedenborg's teachings, focusing early on Hell, depicted as a source of unrepressed creative and revolutionary energy, rather than Heaven, depicted as authoritarian and regulated, and presenting himself as "a mighty Devil" who writes with " corrosive fires", a reference to the technique employed by Blake of etching passages on metal using acids. This technique in itself is apocalyptic in that it reveals the truth where nothing appeared, thus achieving its apocalyptic purpose by "printing with the infernal method, with corrosive substances, which in Hell are healthy and medicinal, dissolving the apparent surfaces and showing the infinite that was hidden." Once again he aligns himself with tradition, this time of Dante's Inferno where the poet, as Blake does here, travels to Hell. Blake blends the traditions of Milton and Dante with his own revolutionary purpose: to reveal to his readers the repressive nature of institutional religion and conventional morality. It replaces the biblical Book of Proverbs with its diabolical version entitled "Proverbs of Hell", a list of provocative and sometimes paradoxical proverbs whose purpose is to energize the mind and induce thought. In one diabolical proverb he issues a call to action, presumably revolutionary, with the proverb "He who desires but does not act, generates pestilence", treating inertia as if it were a highly contagious plague that afflicts the world and prevents the necessary revolution. He also recognizes that if the revolution is to be apocalyptic then there will inevitably be casualties, but "The cut worm forgives the plow", implying that people will be willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. In biblical terms, those who sacrificed their lives in the name of God would be the first to join Christ in the millennium of Heaven on Earth. Blake states that the world is "finite and corrupt" but through the revelations and regeneration of the Apocalypse it will be "infinite and holy". His task as a poet is to open the "doors of perception" so that everything can "appear to man as it is, infinite" through his heightened sensual perception of the world. Perhaps the most revealing passage is the one entitled Opposition is True Friendship which focuses on expounding and denouncing Swedenborg's preaching. He states that Swedenborg is like the angel Blake encountered during his passage through Hell, as both have "the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise ones; they do so with a confident insolence that germinates from systematic reasoning." Likewise "Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; although it is only the contents or index of books already published." Blake is promoting the use of imagination to create new and revolutionary thoughts that will bring Heaven to earth. In contrast, Swedenborg is rooted in the opposite mindset, as Blake makes clear: "Now hear one plain fact: Swedenborg wrote no new truth. Now hear another: he wrote all the old falsehoods." The reasoning behind this, according to Blake, is that he "conversed with the angels which are allreligious, and did not converse with devils, who all hate religion, because he was incapable due to his presumptuous notions", emphasizing once again the repressive nature of formal formalities. , conventional religion. This idea is elaborated in the next section where Blake recounts a conversation he witnessed between an angel and a devil. The conversation centers on the debate over the Ten Commandments, which the Devil sees as repressive, as representing orthodox religion, which attempts to curb desire and creativity the opposites of Reason and Energy will be able to coexist, humanity will prosper, claims Blake. In terms of apocalyptic images the most striking is that of Leviathan wreaking havoc on the earth in Plate 18, a clear representation of the French Revolution as noted by Paley, who states that "the Leviathan is, as has been widely recognized, a vision of the French Revolution" and, more interestingly, by Martin K. Nurmi who points out that the Leviathan's direction "to the east, about three degrees distant" tells us the direction of Paris, the center of the French Revolution. Paley points out that "this part of the episode is likely to be a parody of Swedenborg's vision of the destruction of Babylon in A Treatise Concerning the Last Judgment and the Destruction of Babylon" while also serving to show how the Millennium and the Apocalypse are contiguous . Blake's "angel's friend" flees the terrifying scene leaving the narrator in what appears to be part of the millennial world "on a pleasant bank beside a moonlit river, listening to a harpist singing the harp." The Apocalypse and the Millennium are in fact the same ones just seen with different perceptions "due to your metaphysics", that is, your spiritual beliefs. Blake therefore presents the French Revolution as apocalyptic and millennial. As an appendix to The Marriage, Blake wrote A Song of Liberty which celebrates the fall of a tyrant, with strong echoes of Revelations XII in the characters of the mother, the divine child, and the menacing beast. He mixes images of real history, such as "France, tear down your prison" in reference to the French Revolution's storming and demolition of the Bastille prison, with biblical images of the Apocalypse. He employs a list of imperatives that culminate in the appeal to man: "Look up! Look up!" and "enlarge your face" whether you are in England (Oh citizen of London), the Middle East (Oh Jew) or Africa (Oh African! Black African!) that the revolution, the apocalypse and subsequently the millennium may be reached all over the world. This would result in "the son of fire" unleashing an apocalyptic doom upon the world and then "unleashing the eternal horses from their dens of night, crying, 'The Empire is no more! And now the lion and the wolf will cease.' ". This echoes the prophecy in Isaiah LXV which reads "the wolf and the lamb will feed together" in the post-apocalyptic Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Blake, in choosing to make the theme of this work a wedding, is part of the tradition among first-generation Romantic poets that Kelvin Everest describes as the "frequent deployment of images of marriage...[that] draws on the biblical imagery of the millennium as a marriage", as shown in the Apocalypse when we see the holy city, the New Jerusalem "coming down from God from heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (Revelation, XXI) to constitute a marriage between the new Kingdom of Heaven and Christ. Blake aligns himself with this tradition by suggesting the most revolutionary marriage between Heaven and Hell. However, being skeptical of orthodox religion and its sanctioned practices, Blake desires a marriage in which none of the opposites submit..