Blake & Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
Again, ‘every thing that lives’ in the outward world ‘reflects back’, and is thus necessary to that which lives in the inward. In Jerusalem Blake writes of the ‘Living Creatures’ who declare:
Let the Indefinite be explored . . ..
Let all Indefinites be . . .
melted in the Furnaces of Affliction . . ..
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organizd Particulars And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power. The Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate Identity . . ..93
In Boehme’s words, without ‘this Birth or Substance there could be nothing’.94 He saw the necessity of individual form, stating: ‘Every Spirit without a body is empty, and knows not itself, and therefore every spirit desires a Body for its food and for its habitation’.95 Boehme and Blake worked in response to the dangers they perceived in formlessness and abstraction. In The Book of Urizen, Blake’s character Los is confronted with the ‘void’, the ‘soul-shudd’ring vacuum’; is ‘affrighted/At the formless immeasurable death’.96 Blake wrote in Jerusalem of the ‘Abstract, which is a Negation/Not only of the Substance from which it is derived/A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer/Of every Divine Member’97—that is, of the minute particulars of existence. In accord with the importance, as Blake expressed it, of ‘putting off the Indefinite/Into most holy forms of Thought’,98 Boehme wrote in The Signature of All Things:
A true Christian is in the spirit a Christian, and in continual exercise to bring forth its own form, not only with words in sound and show, but in the power of the work, as a visible palpable form . . . as a servant of God in God’s deeds of wonder.99
He states in the Clavis that ‘the spiritual Substance must needs bring itself into a material ground, wherein it may . . . figure and form itself’.100 This ‘form’ or ‘body’ is essential for manifestation, not least—and in fact most importantly—for the manifestation of the divine to man. It is as the ‘Glass’ (or mirror) of the outward world in which the inner