Blake & Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
of tradition was one that regarded living personal experience as paramount. It was something to which one actively contributes. While certain critics have dismissed the importance of Blake’s more esoteric sources, part of his art lay in the way he learned from, interpreted and created anew what lies at the core of such works. Certain of these sources are valuable precisely to the degree that they encourage autonomy and creativity in the individual.3
As Blake was relatively isolated in his own time—he lamented that his ‘lot’ was ‘to be left and neglected’ and to see his work ‘cried down as eccentricity and madness’4—it was important to him to find a living tradition, a community of vision and aspiration that provided support, guidance and inspiration. He believed that ‘Life consists of these Two Throwing off Error <and Knaves from our company> continually
Blake and some of his contemporaries faced the dilemma of the artist in what Matthew Arnold called ‘an epoch of concentration’. In such an age society does not provide the creative power with ‘a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power’ characteristic of an ‘epoch of expansion’, but ‘books and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and intelligence in which he may live and work’.6
Blake has written that ‘Rent from Eternal Brotherhood we die & are no more’.7
In writers such as Boehme, Blake found a source of support and encouragement, a bond and sense of community with kindred spirits throughout the centuries. In turn he was able through his art to keep alive and pass on the spirit that animated those like Boehme. The twentieth-century Russian philosopher and theologian Nicholas