K E V I N F I S C H E R
Seeing a connection between the false God of worldly religion and the God of disembodied rationalism, he asks in The Book of Ahania, ‘Shall we worship this Demon of smoke,/. . . this abstract non-entity/ This cloudy God’.56 Boehme’s writings supply the answer, that the ‘Spirit of Christ in God, will not be bound to any Laws’,57 for Man in Paradise ‘had no Law, but only the Law of the Imagination’.58 He adds, ‘God’s Spirit is not to be judged by reason’.59
With this in view, Boehme and Blake understood that each individual should, in Boehme’s words, ‘seek and find himself . . . for all things are generated out of imagination . . . and every imagination reaps its own work which it has wrought’.60 For him the spiritual life is centred in inner, living personal experience: ‘thou must thyself be the way, the understanding must be born in thee . . . thou must enter into it, so that the understanding . . . may be opened to thee’.61 Émile Boutroux observes of Boehme’s vision: ‘A living method, alone, enables us to penetrate into the mysteries of life. Being, alone, knows being.’62 Being, alone, knows being. This is an essential point. Ultimate authority resides in the infinite potential within the individual. Boehme asks, ‘How should you not have Power and Authority to speak of God, who is your Father, of whose essence you are?’63 When
the Heaven, and the Birth of the Elements are spoken of, it is not a Thing afar off, or that is distant from us, that is spoken of; but we speak of Things that are done in our Body and Soul; and there is nothing nearer us than this birth, for we live and move therein, as in the House of our Mother; and when we speak of Heaven, we speak of our native Country.64
Blake wrote out of this ‘Country’:
in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within
Gyles Calvert, 1651); repr. in The Signature of all Things and Other Writings (Cambridge:
James Clarke, 1969), 15:41.