Blake & Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
the mirror of Wisdom. Sophia is the ‘Glass’ in which, looking through and not with the eye, we see the divine:
She is the Substantiality of the spirit, which the Spirit of God putteth on as a Garment, whereby he manifesteth himself, or else his form would not be known: for she is the Spirit’s Corporeity, and though she is not a corporeal palpable substance, like as Men, yet she is substantial and visible, but the Spirit is not substantial. For we Men can, in Eternity, see no more of the Spirit of God, but only the Glance of the Majesty; and his glorious power we feel in us, for it is our life
Blake’s Jerusalem, his own Sophia, appears in a similar light:
In Great Eternity, every particular Form gives forth or Emanates Its own peculiar Light, & the Form is the Divine Vision
And the Light is his Garment This is Jerusalem in every Man.109
For Blake and Boehme, the similitude ultimately directs the imagina tion to the ‘Divine Image’, Christ. As Boehme states in Mysterium Magnum, the ‘soul cannot see God, save only in the new-born image: only through and in the virgin Sophia… in the name Jesus’.110 None ‘can see God unless God first becomes Man in him’. Where Boehme speaks of the ‘love play’ of the imagination in the mirror of Sophia, Blake writes of ‘the sports of Wisdom in the Human Imagination/Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus’.111 The ‘image’ of this ‘Divine Body’ is a ‘form’ in which the human imagination can ‘take hold’. As Blake saw, ‘All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the Divine body of the Saviour’.112 The image of Christ’s Incarnation ‘reflects back’ to us our own embodied nature, and the inexhaustible spiritual potential within us; a potential that Blake and Boehme locate in Christ. As Boehme wrote, ‘the most inward Ground in Man is . . . Christ ’.113 The ‘Human Soul is a Spark out of . . . the divine’.114 For both visionaries, imagination unites us with Christ. Again, as the figure of the Saviour