William Blake (1757-1827) was a British artist and poet who straddled the ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, a transitional era marked by political radicalism, intellectual exploration, and renewed religious fervor. One of the most hotly contested spheres of intellectual and creative inquiry in the period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism was the relationship between an individual’s rational side, his or her “reason,” and the spiritual or non-rational side embodied by emotion, passion, longing, and religious exaltation. Dreams were an important site of this contest because they represented a state of being, as we see clearly in Goya’s The Sleep of Reason, where the rational mind has lost control and is subordinated to the irrational – fears, desires, etc. The crux of the debate between the Enlightenment adherents and their Romantic critics was just how far reason could take a person. What were its limits? What was required to push beyond reason to gain some sort of higher understanding? Enlightenment thinkers, of course, considered reason itself the vehicle to attain the highest form of understanding – whether of the material or even of the metaphysical (divine) realm. The book of Job, a text from the Hebrew Bible, presented Blake with an interesting testing ground to explore some of these questions. In a series of 21 illustrations, Blake visualizes and re-invents the story of Job, an “innocent” man whose faith, upon the request of the Accuser (the satan), is tested by God through intense suffering. The dream scene comes at the mid-point of the book, illustration 11, and serves a pivotal role in Job’s ultimate acceptance of his guilt and his subsequent religious conversion.

Blake: Book of Job

Book of Job, King James’ Version