To affirm the material

In my mass I write well-nigh 'poetic knowledge' as well as the importance of imagination every bit a vehicle of truth. One of the key figures inwards the English linguistic communication Romantic own - worth to a greater extent than than a brief refer - is William Blake, who died inwards 1827. He was influenced by, amid other things, Jacob Boehme’s as well as Emmanuel Swedenborg’s astonishing visions of inner worlds as well as the “new Church” of the Spirit; simply too yesteryear his friend Thomas Taylor’s powerful translations of the industrial plant of Plato. Blake worked every bit an engraver as well as painter, designing visionary images that are nearly ever striking, if non startling. He was too a poet as well as a prophet, expressing his prophetic inspiration through a vast as well as obscure mythology. These mythological writings stand upwards for the triumph of human liberty as well as the liberation of human energies yesteryear agency of a cosmic state of war that rages from Eden through America as well as Albion to the terminate of the world.

In keeping amongst the spirit of these works, Blake was a radical inwards social thought, as well as a heretic inwards religious belief. He raged against the “dark, satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution that were destroying Nature as well as the traditions of human craftsmanship, as well as against “Newton’s sleep”, the Rationalism that he believed was destroying the life of the Imagination. Interestingly, despite Blake's heretical tendences, inwards the biography that G.K. Chesterton published inwards 1910 he presents Blake as well as St Thomas Aquinas every bit warriors fighting inwards the same war, as well as fifty-fifty on the same side. Chesterton contrasts 2 types of mysticism, that of Christendom as well as that of Orientalism. The latter is the mysticism of oversimplification, of the dissolution of many into one. But Blake, he argues, “was on the side of historic Christianity on the telephone substitution query on which it confronts the East; the see that personality is the glory of the universe as well as non its shame”.

So Blake’s infidel mysticism was on the side of Christendom against the Orient. And hence Blake as well as St Thomas are agreed that “the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material”. Aquinas confirms Blake’s telephone substitution intuition that things are to a greater extent than real, non less real, than they seem to us. “And in that place is an upper the world of what the Schoolman called Fruition, or Fulfilment, inwards which all this relative relativity becomes actuality; inwards which the trees outburst into blossom or the rockets into flame”.

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