K E V I N F I S C H E R
The Mind that could have produced this Sentence must have been [of] a Pitiful a Pitiable Imbecillity. I always thought that the Human Mind was the most Prolific of All Things & Inexhaustible.39
Boehme distinguishes between a lower form of understanding that is bound, as he put it, to the ‘natural life, whose ground lies in a temporal beginning and end’, and a higher, living, imaginative knowledge that is able to ‘enter the supernatural ground where God is understood’.40 This distinction also appears in Blake, in ‘the Mighty difference’ he discerned between a mental process that is limited to the ‘Vanities of Time & Space’, seeing only itself in the shadowy ‘Vegetable Glass of Nature’, and the ‘Eternal . . . Worlds of Vision’ revealed in the creative knowledge of ‘Spiritual Mystery’.41 As he wrote, ‘Allegory addressd to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry’.42 The intellect of which Blake here speaks is imaginative and intuitive.
Blake writes in Jerusalem that the sublime riches of the inner life are ‘Shadowy to those who dwell not in them, meer possibilities:/But to those who enter into them they seem the only substances’.43 A great deal of Blake’s and Boehme’s work is addressed to the ways in which human beings are shut off from awareness of all the potential that lies within them. As Blake states, ‘man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’.44 In The Book of Urizen, he writes of those who cannot ‘rise at will/In the infinite void, but’ are ‘bound down/To earth by their narrowing perceptions’.45 In Europe, the faculties of such persons are ‘Turn’d outward, barr’d and petrify’d against the infinite’.46 Both Blake and Boehme equate this exile with the Fall of Man. In Mysterium Magnum, Boehme states that Adam ‘lost his clear pure steady eyes and sight, which was from the divine essence’, and that this essence ‘remained in man, but it was as ‘twere a nothing to man in its life; for it stood hidden’.47
Disembodied rationalism is a major source of this loss. As the divine spark that is in fallen man is hidden, Blake saw that ‘the Reasoning Spectre/Stands between the Vegetable Man & his Immortal