Blake & Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
is other than, and beyond ourselves. It is a means of putting us more in touch with—and more into—the world, acting as a bridge between the experiencing individual and that which is experienced. It helps root us in living experience. As Boehme put it, ‘the outward Essence reacheth not the inward in the soul, but only by the imagination’.24 Imagination can therefore provide a fuller, truer form of knowledge and understanding. As Evelyn Underhill perceived, ‘True Mysticism is active and practical, not passive and theoretical. It is an organic life-process, a something which the whole self does; not something as to which the intellect holds an opinion.’25
It is notable that by contrast with many mystics and visionaries, Boehme and Blake accorded great significance to the activities of the senses. Blake’s Isaiah declares in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing’.26 Envisioning an imaginative elevation of the senses and emotions that manifests the eternal and divine, Boehme speaks of the ‘harmony of hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting and smelling’ that is ‘the true intellective life’.27 When the rational faculty is integrated as it should be with all the faculties, true Reason prevails. Boehme and Blake are visionaries. Perception lies at the core of their work, as the imaginative engagement of all the senses. The body is therefore a necessary part of the whole self. Embodied experience is central. Blake argued in the Marriage that ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses’.28 This is in accord with Boehme, who saw that without a body the ‘Spirit is void . . . there is no understanding . . . the spirit itself does not subsist without a body’.29
While imagination helps place us more fully in the world as it is, its relationship with that world is at the same time creative. While Boehme does not fit conventional ideas of what constitutes an artist, he can be seen as creative in a broader sense. Blake understood that true Art is a spiritual activity, a creative life that every individual should pursue: ‘The whole Business of Man Is The Arts & All Things Common.’ As