Blake & Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
spiritualised. It is quite possible to have entirely rejected belief in the God of orthodox religion and nonetheless to perceive the divine as Blake and Boehme apprehended it. In fact, this can be as good a point as any from which to start in attempting to understand the living, if elusive, spirit that animates their works.
Throughout his writings Boehme stresses that he ‘may happen not to be understood clearly enough by the desirous Reader’, and that he ‘shall be as one that is altogether dumb to the unenlightened’.15 In the Aurora he states that when the active spiritual imagination is truly alive in him, ‘I absolutely and infallibly believe, know and see . . .; yet not in the flesh, but in the spirit, in the impulse and motion of God . .
.. Neither is this my Natural will, that I could do it by my own small ability; for if the Spirit were withdrawn from me, then I could neither know nor understand my own Writings’.16 This acknowledgement of the limitations of our usual, often conditioned and habitual, modes of perception and understanding is essential. A different kind of engage ment with and understanding of the world, and of existence in it, is necessary.
Both Boehme and Blake saw how reason can be limiting when it is too prominent, and too disconnected from our other vital faculties and capacities. Boehme wrote of his works that ‘a Man’s Reason, without the light of God, cannot come into the Ground [of them], it is impossible, let his wit be ever so high and subtle, it apprehends but as it were the Shadow of it in a Glass’.17 As Blake wrote in Jerusalem, when ‘the Reasoning Power in Man’ is ‘separated/From Imagination,’ it encloses ‘itself as in steel, in a Ratio/Of the Things of Memory’.18
In his recent and very important book on the workings of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, Iain McGilchrist casts light on this. Imagination is primarily at work in the right hemisphere, while rationalism has a tendency to dominate in the left. McGilchrist writes, ‘in almost every case, what is new must first be present in the right hemisphere, before it can come into focus to the left.’ It ‘is only . . . the