K E V I N F I S C H E R
spirit sees and finds itself. Creative embodied imagination is key to the realisation of the divine, for, Boehme asserted, ‘we must use Similitudes, if we intend to speak of God’.101 As he wrote of fallen man, and specifically of imagination and its possibilities, ‘in God’s holiness it cannot take hold; for the will was rent off from that; therefore there must now be a similitude wherein the imagination of the human nature may take hold’.102 Throughout his own works Blake endeavours to manifest ‘the Divine Image’.103 He wrote:
Man can have no idea of anything greater than Man as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness . . .. Think of a white cloud. as being holy you cannot love it but think of a holy man within the cloud love springs up in your thought, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections.104
Imagination creates the bridge between, makes possible the aware ness of the interrelationship between, the human and the divine. Blake’s belief that ‘God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men’ is also in Boehme, who argued that God ‘hath manifested himself by the externall World in a similitude, that the spirit might see itselfe in the Being essentially, and not so onely, but that the Creature likewise might contemplate and behold the being of God in the Figure, and know it’.105 The similitude appears in both Boehme’s and Blake’s works. Through it, Boehme explores the relationship between God and man. He saw that he ‘was to form and fashion holy figures and images with my mouth and expression; even as You, O eternal God, have formed and framed everything through Your holy Name’.106 The relationship between man and the divine may thus be said, with qualifications, to be one of interdependence.
To elaborate on this, Boehme regarded the outward world as ‘a formed Model or Platform, wherein the Great Mind of Divine Manifestation beholds itself in a Time, and plays with itself’.107 Boehme identified that in which the ‘Great Mind . . . beholds itself’ as Sophia,