K E V I N F I S C H E R
says at the beginning of Jerusalem, as already quoted in part above:
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine . . ..
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! We are One.115
Blake’s and Boehme’s work is directed towards the revelation of the unitive and indwelling Christ who, as Boehme believed, ‘brought the Divine Image into . . . the Soul: And this is done by the Imagination’.116 At the same time, as the outward world and the inward are not finally separate, but interrelated, both understood that imagination not only unites us with Christ within us, but also, as part of one and the same realisation, with Christ in the world outside us. Thus Boehme declares, ‘God must become man, man must become God; heaven must become one thing with the earth, the earth must be turned to heaven’.117 Through the imaginative life of the indwelling Christ, the distinctions of outward and inward disappear, revealing the ultimate unity and identity of the two.
In particular, imagination is vital, because it helps put us in touch with that which is other than ourselves, in the outside world, not least other people. Empathic, it connects us with other human beings. It is that in which, as Blake perceived, ‘All/Human Forms’ are ‘identified’:118
He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children
One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & in the midst Jesus will appear; so he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized.119
As Boehme saw, ‘there is but One God . . . when the vail is put away from thy Eyes, so that thou seest and knowest him, then thou wilt also see and know all thy brethren’.120 All ‘men are but one man . . . God created only him, and the other creating he left to man’.121 When reason is too shut off from all of the other human faculties and capacities, it can abstract us from our humanity. As Blake puts it, in ‘Attempting to be more than Man We become less’.122 Embodied imagination