The next stage in rediscovery was to find out what the great body of dogmatic truth had affirmed about Jesus down the Christian centuries. Here he made little progress. He probably felt, as we all do at times, that the simplicity of the gospel was lost in the maze of dogmatic subtleties. The negative aspect of dogma, that it rules out all that would infringe on that simplicity, never occurred to him. His mind was governed and distracted by Hindoo pantheism, and catholic anthropomorphism filtered and diluted through Swedenborg. Even after he had repudiated Swedenborg the distraction remained. His new understanding of Christ taught him that he must accept the ultimate antinomy of good and evil, and that therefore Christ's heaven and hell must remain; but the pantheism never abated its watery flood, and the emphatic catholic teaching of transcendence and immanence gained no sufficient hold to deliver his mind.
The truth is that Blake was not a great thinker, still less a system-builder. He ought to have found the best Christian system while young and kept to it. Then he could have lived his life of vision within coherent bounds. Clear, sharp dogma, like outline in art, would have given rest to his mind, substance to his visions, and saved him from the waste of pouring out a torrent of incoherent sayings containing scraps of gnosticism, theosophy, rosicrucianism, and almost every heresy under the sun.
The master-mind in his youth who could have given him a sound system was Dr Johnson, and he would not listen to him. How should the arch-rebel pay any attention to the arch-conservator? Dr Johnson said many foolish things about things of no great importance: he was wise in great matters. An ounce of folly, like a dead fly in the ointment, suffices to put off the fastidious rebel, who will seize hold of any excuse. Eventually Blake subscribed to the same creed as Dr Johnson. That surely is a marvellous unanimity for such diverse minds.
The master-mind in his age who could have given him a better system than his own, and to whom he was beginning to listen, was Dante. His catholicism may have been of a medieval pattern, but it was very little infected with the time-spirit; it is even now finer than Swedenborg's fabrication, and modern compared with the gnosticism that bulked so largely in Blake's mind.
