What does it take to put a fractured world back together? Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon joins Evan Rosa to explore William Blake as the great counter-Enlightenment guide for our anxious, divided age. "The world comes to be seen as it truly is, which is infinite, and that can embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing." In this episode with Evan Rosa, Vernon explains how to read William Blake, and reflects on Blake as the most important post-Reformation Christian mystic—a poet, painter, and philosopher offering not just a diagnosis of modern division but the beginnings of an antidote. Together they discuss Newton's long shadow and the withdrawal of inner life; the fragmentation of humanity from itself, nature, and the divine; the marriage of heaven and hell; cleansing the doors of perception; imagination as abundance rather than scarcity; desire rightly ordered; and Blake's Christ, who acts from impulse rather than rule. ——— Episode Highlights "I think he's the most important post-Reformation Christian mystic." "We need these oppositions in order to create the dynamism of life and hence the Marriage of Heaven and Hell." "The task is to align, align with the goods in the melee, and see how that which is seemingly different for you, might have something to offer you." "The world comes to be seen as it truly is, which is infinite, and that can embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing." "The fullness of the love, the fullness of the goods, paradoxically, it can seem, is only revealed when it reaches out to that, which seems to be the opposite of it." ——— About Mark Vernon Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster, and psychotherapist with a private practice in London, and a former Anglican priest. His studies began with a physics degree at Durham University, followed by two degrees in theology and a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy from the University of Warwick; he has also worked at the Maudsley Hospital. He contributes to the BBC, the Guardian, and Church Times, and podcasts frequently. His books range across friendship, wellbeing, ancient philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and the Inkling Owen Barfield. His most recent book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (Hurst, 2024), has drawn praise from Rowan Williams and others as among the finest recent studies of Blake. Learn more and follow at markvernon.com, his Substack A Golden String (markvernon942268.substack.com), and @platospodcasts on X. ——— Helpful Links and Resources Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/a-secret-history-of-christianity-book Dante's Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/dantes-divine-comedy-book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake (The William Blake Archive): https://www.blakearchive.org/work/mhh Mark Vernon's website: https://www.markvernon.com A Golden String (Substack): https://markvernon942268.substack.com ——— Show Notes Underappreciated, often typecast visionary 1827—approaching the 200th anniversary of Blake's death approaching Tumultuous age: Seven Years' War, American and French Revolutions, Napoleonic Wars London quadruples in size; Hindu, Islamic, and global ideas arrive "I think he's the most important post reformation Christian, mystic" Polymath—poet, painter, philosopher, didact Counter-Enlightenment response to rationalism Isaac Newton's influence "can't be overstated" One law binds falling apple and orbiting moon Locke, Bentham, utilitarianism, calculation as the moral measure "withdrawing the inner life of human beings"—the objective as gold standard Fragmentation: dividing humanity from itself, nature, the gods Reading Blake now offers "the beginnings of an antidote too" Feeling and imagination complement reason; imagination as the shape of energy Marvel superheroes analogy—one superpower detached goes wrong Bacon's dream: tools to restore Eden, and its tragedy Magnet's two poles—the marriage of heaven and hell Angels grow complacent, devils too dastardly; tension creates beauty and exuberance Cleansing the doors of perception; a world in a grain of sand "align, align with the goods in the melee" Division never purifies society—"it just leads to a mess" "embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing" Heaven and hell as states of mind; participative epistemology Education that teaches students to divide themselves from learning Imagination as abundance, not scarcity Desire rightly ordered—"less than all cannot satisfy man" Blake's Christ acts from impulse, not rule Fountains of living water; the closing lines of Jerusalem ——— #WilliamBlake #MarkVernon #ForTheLifeoftheWorld #Imagination #MarriageOfHeavenAndHell #CounterEnlightenment #ChristianMysticism #Theology #Poetry #DoorsOfPerception
What does it take to put a fractured world back together? Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon joins Evan Rosa to explore William Blake as the great counter-Enlightenment guide for our anxious, divided age.
"The world comes to be seen as it truly is, which is infinite, and that can embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing."
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Vernon explains how to read William Blake, and reflects on Blake as the most important post-Reformation Christian mystic—a poet, painter, and philosopher offering not just a diagnosis of modern division but the beginnings of an antidote. Together they discuss Newton's long shadow and the withdrawal of inner life; the fragmentation of humanity from itself, nature, and the divine; the marriage of heaven and hell; cleansing the doors of perception; imagination as abundance rather than scarcity; desire rightly ordered; and Blake's Christ, who acts from impulse rather than rule.
———
Episode Highlights
"I think he's the most important post-Reformation Christian mystic."
"We need these oppositions in order to create the dynamism of life and hence the Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
"The task is to align, align with the goods in the melee, and see how that which is seemingly different for you, might have something to offer you."
"The world comes to be seen as it truly is, which is infinite, and that can embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing."
"The fullness of the love, the fullness of the goods, paradoxically, it can seem, is only revealed when it reaches out to that, which seems to be the opposite of it."
———
About Mark Vernon
Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster, and psychotherapist with a private practice in London, and a former Anglican priest. His studies began with a physics degree at Durham University, followed by two degrees in theology and a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy from the University of Warwick; he has also worked at the Maudsley Hospital. He contributes to the BBC, the Guardian, and Church Times, and podcasts frequently. His books range across friendship, wellbeing, ancient philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and the Inkling Owen Barfield. His most recent book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (Hurst, 2024), has drawn praise from Rowan Williams and others as among the finest recent studies of Blake. Learn more and follow at markvernon.com, his Substack A Golden String (markvernon942268.substack.com), and @platospodcasts on X.
———
Helpful Links and Resources
Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination
A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/a-secret-history-of-christianity-book
Dante's Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/dantes-divine-comedy-book
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake (The William Blake Archive): https://www.blakearchive.org/work/mhh
Mark Vernon's website: https://www.markvernon.com
A Golden String (Substack): https://markvernon942268.substack.com
———
Show Notes
Underappreciated, often typecast visionary
1827—approaching the 200th anniversary of Blake's death approaching
Tumultuous age: Seven Years' War, American and French Revolutions, Napoleonic Wars
London quadruples in size; Hindu, Islamic, and global ideas arrive
"I think he's the most important post reformation Christian, mystic"
Polymath—poet, painter, philosopher, didact
Counter-Enlightenment response to rationalism
Isaac Newton's influence "can't be overstated"
One law binds falling apple and orbiting moon
Locke, Bentham, utilitarianism, calculation as the moral measure
"withdrawing the inner life of human beings"—the objective as gold standard
Fragmentation: dividing humanity from itself, nature, the gods
Reading Blake now offers "the beginnings of an antidote too"
Feeling and imagination complement reason; imagination as the shape of energy
Marvel superheroes analogy—one superpower detached goes wrong
Bacon's dream: tools to restore Eden, and its tragedy
Magnet's two poles—the marriage of heaven and hell
Angels grow complacent, devils too dastardly; tension creates beauty and exuberance
Cleansing the doors of perception; a world in a grain of sand
"align, align with the goods in the melee"
Division never purifies society—"it just leads to a mess"
"embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing"
Heaven and hell as states of mind; participative epistemology
Education that teaches students to divide themselves from learning
Imagination as abundance, not scarcity
Desire rightly ordered—"less than all cannot satisfy man"
Blake's Christ acts from impulse, not rule
Fountains of living water; the closing lines of Jerusalem
———
#WilliamBlake #MarkVernon #ForTheLifeoftheWorld #Imagination #MarriageOfHeavenAndHell #CounterEnlightenment #ChristianMysticism #Theology #Poetry #DoorsOfPerception
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: Hi, friends. A brief message before we begin today's episode. Just a reminder that we're gonna be running episodes for the next few weeks up until the beginning of July, and then the show's gonna be taking a two month production break, and then we'll be returning in September with a whole new slate of brand new episodes.
But don't go anywhere just yet. Upcoming episodes include conversation between Miroslav Volf and Nicholas Waldorf on Living with Grief, a conversation I had with Mako Fujimura on what art is and a few more conversational goodies. Grateful that you're listening and enjoy the episode. From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world.
A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Mark Vernon: Light wins out over darkness. Love does win out over hate, but the fullness of the love, the fullness of the good paradoxically it can seem is only revealed when it reaches out to that, which seems to be the opposite of it.
Evan Rosa: The paradox that Mark Vernon is describing here. That love is only made whole when it turns toward its opposite is the puzzle at the heart of William Blake. For 200 years, Blake has been typecast as a kind of mad visionary, but Mark wants to reintroduce him as one of the most important post reformation Kristin mystics and as a guide toward mending the fracture that started with a crack of the enlightenment that we're still living in.
But to understand Blake as such, you first have to feel the world that he was born into and understand the way it perhaps unwittingly came apart.
Mark Vernon: Really, the figure of Isaac Newton's influence can't be overstated. We remember it now as the falling of the apple. The same force causes the moon to orbit the earth.
And you know, we're taught it at school, so we take it for granted. Newton had, you know, derived the laws of gravity, the laws of motion optics. This was a massive imaginative think actually. The integration of seemingly very disparate phenomena. And so this set in motion a whole bunch of people trying to describe all aspects of experience and life and reality lawfully, and this has this effect of withdrawing the inner life.
Of human beings from the in life of the rest of the world because the objective comes to be the gold standard, by which truth is to be judged.
And so this is the tension that the Enlightenment gives birth to. And so you see the fragmentation of the world beginning to occur in this period with this simultaneous effect of dividing humanity from itself, from the rest of the natural world, from the gods. Figures like Blake too, I think can be regarded as part of that counter enlightenment movement, which turn to feeling, turn to imagination, turn to that which in Blake's view should compliment.
Reason and reason, as it were, can be the shape of energy, he said. So it can give it focus, give it direction, help discernment.
Evan Rosa: So that's the wound, a humanity divided from itself, divided from nature, divided from the divine. And in William Blake, the first stirrings of a cure. This antidote isn't to reject reason, it's to refuse to let reason rule alone. And his image for how opposites belong together isn't a truce or a compromise.
It's a marriage. The title and the engine of his great work of the marriage of heaven and hell to help explain it. Mark uses the example of a magnet.
Mark Vernon: He's influenced by an emerging science of electromagnetism. And much like a magnet has two poles and you need the north pole and the south pole. In order to create the field to create the energy of the magnet, it sort of holds the energy of the magnet.
So Blake thought that life could be modeled in that way, that we need these oppositions in order to create the dynamism of life and hence the marriage of heaven and hell. But you need that kind of tension. Blake argues in order to create the energy, which is the exuberance, which is beauty, he links all these things together in the marriage of heaven and hell, but rather feeling how you can enter into what might even feel like the chaos.
Um, but this cleanses the doors of perception. Blake argues because then what you're actually encountering. It's the infinite in its multiple manifestations, so the task is to align with the goods in the melee and see how that which is seemingly different for you might have something to offer you. The world comes to be seen as it truly is, which is infinite, and that can embrace distinction and difference as much as similarity and sharing.
Evan Rosa: Embrace distinction and difference as much as similarity and sharing. That's the thread that you can hold onto for everything that follows in this episode. Mark Vernon helps me understand how to read William Blake following him out of the diagnosis and into the cure, trying to understand why you can only really see what you're willing to participate in and what that means for how we educate and how we pay attention, and how imagination might be recovered.
Imagination not as fantasy or daydreaming. But as the human faculty of creative possibility, that thing, the modern world shrank and made suspect. We try to understand William Blake's Christ, who acts from impulse rather than rule. And to the vision that ends the poem, Jerusalem, where reason and imagination finally join hands and the furnaces of affliction become fountains of living water.
Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist, a writer. He's got a keen interest in ancient philosophy, and particularly the illumination of the inner life. He's written about friendship, belief, wellbeing, and living in the modern world. He's the author of Books on Spiritual Intelligence, Dante's Defined Comedy, Christianity, as understood by inkling, Owen Barfield and his latest entitled Awake William Blake, and the Power of the Imagination.
Thanks for listening today. Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
Mark Vernon: Thanks for having me all night. I enjoy talking about these things, so I'm keen to get started.
Evan Rosa: Absolutely. I mean, your book about William Blake is really beautiful. It's an amazing introduction to a figure that I think is underappreciated, but clearly holds an important place in modern poetry, art, literature.
And yet as, as you're making the point in the book, is often misunderstood and is typecast in various ways. So I wanted to start by asking you a little bit about a profile of William Blake, uh, for the uninitiated in particular. I wonder if you describe him and his times.
Mark Vernon: Yeah, so he died almost 200 years ago.
He died in 1827. So in a couple of years it'll be the 200th anniversary of his death, and he died at the age of 70. So he lives through the second half of the 18th century. Into the 19th. And so this is the period of what is sometimes called actually the First World War. Meaning it had global reach, the seven years war that he was born into, um, in the middle of the 18th century.
But then there's the American War Independence, um, the 13th colonies in becoming the first state. And then he also lives with the French Revolution and then the aftermath of that, which in Europe was very devastating. The Napoleonic Wars, a million people die across the continent. So this is very tumultuous time, but it's also a time where the British Empire is, you know, absolutely thriving.
So the, the city of London where he lives, it quadruples in size. Ideas are coming in from all around the globe, from the Indian subcontinents, what we would now call Hindu ideas, Islamic ideas. It meets probably indigenous Americans to, so it's this time of extraordinary fertile thought. And for Blake, this very much feeds into his Christian mysticism.
And one of the things which I really wanna try and stress is that I think he's the most important post reformation Christian mystic. And explaining how, you know that comes from him is one thing which I'm really keen to try and do. You know, he lives to a good age, 70. He mixes with all the great figures of his times in London.
Um, we have quite a lot of his books with his annotations. You can think of him as a great autodidact as well as the poet and the painter that he's known for now, for obvious reasons,
Evan Rosa: right?
Mark Vernon: But I think he has a very sharp mind. Um, he's as much a philosopher as a poet, and he's quite well known in the first part of his life.
He does become less well known publicly in the second half. He wanted to be well known. He wanted to be a kind of Michelangelo or a Leonardo of his times, really shaping the consciousness of his age. But he's well known enough and, um, you know, survives obviously very much now in the 200 years since he died.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And clearly he, I mean, when you begin to explore and, and see what is present throughout his life and work, he does begin to appear like this polymath able to speak in so many ways and in a kind of very synthetic, systematic way. But I wanted to ask, especially knowing you are wanting to reintroduce him as having Christianity a little closer to the core of his outlook than he's understood to be, but also an appreciation.
And I think this would be importantly related, an appreciation that he's also working against this stream of enlightenment rationalism.
Mark Vernon: So he's born in this century, the 18th century, where really the figure of Isaac Newton's influence can't be overstated. So at the beginning of the 18th century, 17th century, Newton had.
Derived the laws of gravity, the laws of motion optics. This was a massive imaginative feat, actually, the integration of seemingly very disparate phenomena. We remember it now as the falling of the apple. Yeah. The same force causes the moon to orbit the earth. And you know, we're taught at schools so we take it for granted, but that absolutely bold people's minds over.
I mean, the minute you think about it, it's a very counterintuitive thought. And moreover, he showed that the force, or at least the way of describing the forces that govern these things, he, he, Newton was always actually ambivalent about what a force might be, but you could describe it.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Mark Vernon: By a law that was very simple, really, you know, an inverse square law.
And so this set in motion, a whole bunch of people trying to describe all aspects of experience and life and reality lawfully. It gives birth to figures like John Locke investigating the mind and government and education. And then figures like Jeremy Bentham completely remaking how people think about what it is to be good and to pursue a moral life with the invention of utilitarianism.
Yeah. And all around the idea that you can make calculations. Mm-hmm. And this has this effect of withdrawing the inner life of human beings from the inner life of the rest of the world. Yeah. Because the objective comes to be the gold standard by which truth is to be judged. And so this is the tension that the Enlightenment gives birth to.
And more or less, immediately spontaneously gives birth to the kind of predecessors of what becomes the reformation movement. So you have figures like Anthony Shaftsbury, who's not well known now, but very influential in the 18th century. And then figures like Blake too, I think can be. As part of that counter enlightenment movement, which turn to feeling, turn to imagination, turn to that which in Blake's view should compliment reason and reason as a working be the shape of energy, he said.
So it can give it focus, give it direction, help discernment,
Evan Rosa: but ultimately be a servant, right?
Mark Vernon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, there can be differences with distinctions, without difference, as Kohler Ridge puts another hugely important figure in all this, but unfortunately, certainly in the UK anyway. I mean, it differs a bit in Germany on the continent, but certainly in Britain, this lawfulness, particularly in morality, you can, you can as well break.
Life down into issues and then decide, you know, is it good or is it bad? Are you for, or are you against? And so you see the fragmentation of the world beginning to occur in this period, you know, left and right in politics is defined after the French Revolution.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: And of course now we know very much about this way of trying to approach life objectively on the one hand, which brings, you know, many advantages, but with this simultaneous effect of dividing humanity from itself, from the rest of the natural world, from the GOs.
And so, you know, Blake's at the inception of all this, and I think reading him now provides not just an analysis such as I've just, you know, outlined very briefly, but also mm-hmm the beginnings of an antidote too. So he matters in that way as well.
Evan Rosa: It's psychologically interesting to talk about the kind of division that happens there.
I mean, you've written about this in other areas as well, so I wanted to ask a little bit more about what Blake's perspectives on the psychic effects of the fall mean and what that fragmentation or bifurcation might mean for us, even our, in our contemporary moment, in the way that it emerges for us today.
Mark Vernon: Yeah, and he pursues this through various figures like the figure of euros in his poetry and mythology. Euro is a figure, it probably is a pun on your reason or maybe a horizon, a kind of narrowing of horizons to your horizon rather than the divine horizon.
Evan Rosa: I think it would be important to kind of introduce sort of the mythical element in Blake that where he's got several of these kinds of contributions.
I mean, like he's sort of originating these kinds of figures, which I think is very creative and interesting as you get there. Do you mind like prefacing a little bit with that?
Mark Vernon: So, I mean, in a way you can think about them as almost sort of Marvel superheroes that have their one superpower, which when they're all working together, is more likely to go well.
But if one goes off on their own thinking that they've got all that's needed to save the world, then things tend to go wrong. And the film Blake called these figures like Euros and the Eternals, and of course there was a, a Marvel film called the Eternals, you know, directly in homage to Blake. So it's not a bad start at the 10 actually, to think that, you know, a tremendous ability is good when it's complemented by lots of other tremendous abilities.
But when it becomes detached often for very, for good motives, you know, Zen in Blake's work, he feels that the world is too full of suffering, not enough happiness. And that reason can understand, can. Make the world comprehendible and then tame it in some measure, make it safer, bring about the technology that can enable human beings to live well.
This is a great dream. In the early modern period, Francis Bacon had written about how tools like the microscope and telescope were given to humanity to restore Eden on earth. You know, they're very explicit about that. But the tragedy is that when vulnerability sort of takes off and people put their faith in, that, again, that's another kind of division where you lose touch with the fullness of our humanity.
And so payback, you know, sooner or later starts to come.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, it's interesting how, and I want to stay within the kind of rationalist versus, you know, I guess imaginist approach that Blake is bringing here about both the division that. Follows from the fall, but I think is accentuated in enlightenment, rationalism.
I mean, finding the means to divide up the world, carve it at its joints, explain things individually, and sort of reduce them in so many ways. He's standing in opposition to that kind of reductionism. He's wanting to draw things back together. I wonder if you could help explain some of that. You can correct me if I'm jumping too far ahead, but his work on the marriage of heaven and hell and ities and the work of putting back together that which was torn us under.
Mark Vernon: Yeah, I mean you mentioned there the marriage of heaven and hell and Aries, and he's influenced by an emerging science of electromagnetism and much like a magnet has two poles and you need the North Pole and the south Pole in order to create the field to create the energy of the magnet. It sort of holds the energy of the magnets.
So Blake thought that life could be modeled in that way. Yeah. That we need these oppositions in order to create the dynamism of life, and hence the marriage of heaven And hell, you know, on their own, the angels in heaven become a bit complacent in Blake's understanding. Mm-hmm. And on their own, the devils become too dastardly.
But when they're in a kind of dialogue together, you might say the discontent of the demons can combine with the clear sightedness of the angels and move into a a virtuous spiral where the infinite of the divine reality becomes more and more manifest as a result. But you need that kind of tension.
Blake argues in order to create the energy, which is the exuberance, which is beauty, he links all these things together in the marriage of heaven and hell. And this is all about what he famously also calls in that text, the cleansing of the doors of perception, because another. Opposition or contrary that he explores is the contrary between the body and the soul, or between reason and the imagination.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And
Mark Vernon: they're on, they're like poles of a magnet. They're actually part of a single hole. It's not a dualism that he, um, is trying to counter, but rather well he, he also talks about, you know, a world being found in a grain of sand. So this seemingly rocky fragment, as it were, is a minute particular, which when seen a right contains its reflection of the infinite, its reflection of a world.
And so he wants to sort of, in a way enter a third thing always that is created by this tension. So not decide, you know, I'm a North Pole kind of person, I'm gonna try and cut the bar magnets of life in half. 'cause that just doesn't go anywhere. If you cut a bar magnet in half, you just get another two magnets.
You know? And similarly, division doesn't achieve the purification of society that people. On one side or the other, the left or the right, hopeful it just leads to a mess, but rather feeling how you can enter into what might even feel like the chaos. And this is partly reflected in the marriage of heaven and hell as well.
Mm-hmm. But this cleanses the doors of perception. Blake argues because then what you're actually encountering is the infinite in its multiple manifestations. So the task is to align with the goods in the melee and see how that which is seemingly different for you, might have something to offer you. And that can be enriching, that can fill out your experience of life.
And so through this cleansing, um, you know, which is a, a, a metaphor you might say for discernment, for understanding, for bringing in the divine imagination that can open up possibilities that you wouldn't have seen before. The world comes to be seen as it truly is, which is infinite. That can embrace distinction and difference as much as similarity and sharing.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, he writes in the marriage of heaven and hell without contrary is no progression, attraction and repulsion reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. And so in that sense, it seems clear that heaven and hell becomes symbol symbolic of that which is in us in, in a certain sense or in the world and is therefore, you know, part of our experience.
Mark Vernon: I mean, I think that heaven and hell are states of mind. And when you, the more you inhabit those states of mind yourself, the more you see that interiority in the world around you. So it reveals. The truth of the world around you. More and more the doors of perception again, are cleanse and things open up for you.
There's another, you know, dualism that Blake very much resists is between the objective and the subjective or between the body and the soul. He says that one is just a kind of container for the other. And so to see is to inhabit. It's a participative. Epistemology would be a sort of fancy way that a philosopher will put it, that you only know that which you can resonate with that which is in some sense a part of you too.
And so working on yourself is absolutely fundamental to what you know. And so again, you can see the sort of the difference there between that and a, a scientific epistemology, which at least in principle, it doesn't matter who as it were, is telling you about Newton's laws of motion or Newton's laws of gravity.
They're seen to be indifferent to the human minds that's expressing them. Now I did a physics degree and I know quite well that you do actually have to develop certain virtues. You do have to develop a resonance, a participation with that which you're studying in order to see this lawfulness amidst what otherwise looks just like chaos.
So, you know, any working scientist, as it well will know that is a bit of an artificial way of putting it, but it's still become a kind of ideal in our times. Certainly say in our education systems, you are taught facts as if they have nothing to do with fictions now. And that again, is something that emerged in the Georgian periods.
The idea that facts alone would bear the weight of truth rather than how fixed facts fit into a wider picture, a story or telling about what it is to be human, for example, A worldview that can contain all the many facets that get distilled down into the factual. So yeah, that this overall sense, I think in Blake, um.
Don't be afraid, as it were, of the marriage of heaven and hell. You do have to discern things. Yeah, and the good does win out. Light wins out over darkness. Love does win out over hate, and there's no doubt about that in Blake as well. But the fullness of the love, the fullness of the good paradoxically it can seem is only revealed when it reaches out to that, which seems to be the opposite of it.
But I think we know that in life, you know, if you have a row with your partner and you decide you're gonna leave, your life will be diminished If you have a row with your partner and then try and understand what's going on more fully, your life will be enriched. These are sort of human truths, if you like.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, I think I want to stick with the participatory epistemology as well as kind of nod to one, the idea that this is grounded, I think. Fairly well in both the Christian tradition philosophically as well as deeper in a kind of high amorphism, a big word alert, but like the form and matter, right? Hula is matter morphe form, and that which can emerge from that is body and soul.
What it means to be a human being is the importance of the fusion there and the convergence of these things, and I think it's really helpful to be able to appreciate the ways that you brought up education, and I think that's perfect Education as it's practiced in many places. Today is an exercise for most students in division dividing themselves, dividing education from their lives.
Most students, I think that I encounter, at least in where I live, and my own kids included at at school, they're not being taught about the way to integrate themselves with what they're learning. Not at all. They're focused on. Just sort of an achievement based passing of a test. They're not invited into any kind of union with that which they study as you were describing.
And so I, I just partially wanted to put it together in this way because there is something very sensible, I think, about the kind of world that Blake is describing that you might miss in some of the poetic language, which ends up to, uh, an unfamiliar mind. Sometimes it sounds a little out there, but really there's a sensibility to what he's talking about.
Mark Vernon: Yeah. Um, take, take an expression like this, which is in the marriage of heaven and hell too. He says, how do you know every bird that cuts the airy way is a world of immense delight enclosed by the census five. So the bird sweeping through the air. Blake says, if you've seen a right, it's a world of immense delight that is being expressed in that behavior, in that movement.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: And then he has this expression enclosed by the census five. So th there's a lot, there's a sort of rich ambivalence here that which you get in science. And if you've ever watched a nature program, you know, on the television at once, you are told that the creature is performing just behavior, maybe to survive, maybe to mates, maybe to feed.
Mm-hmm. Whatever it might be. And yet the TV program, the film will show the immense beauty of the swooping of the birds, you know, if in this particular case, or it'll be filmed in an extraordinary, beautiful place. And so we'd be given these kind of conflicting messages that are, once it's the void of meaning, and at the same time it's full of meaning.
And Blake, I think, would argue that what we've become confused by there is the imagination. Because we assume, and I think this is run through a lot of education too, that the imagination is something that the individual possesses. It's somehow generated from within the physical person. You know, the skull maybe even, and this is standard neuroscience now.
And it becomes the norm in blades time again. Figures like John Locke and Adam Smith and so on started to develop this sense. You see it in the shifting nature of words actually. So a word like sympathy at the beginning of Blake's life, still just about had the meaning of being chorus to things. The sympathy was that which poured into you from outside.
Ah, but by the end of his life, it'd become, I might have sympathy for you, a kind of movement from the inside out into an otherwise dead world. And so similarly, the imagination, which had been that great flow of life and meaning and color and dynamism and so on, which the birds. It flying through the air.
Yeah. With this, a world of immense delight was expressing as much as everything else in nature that had been shrunken and now became a kind of marginal human faculty that you might have a little bit of, I might have a little bit of the artist has in some great bigger measure, and so there's a sort of scarcity model of imagination sets hold rather than abundant idea of imagination that had obtained previously.
And so all these kind of moves, I think serve to cut us off from the world and make education seem like this sort of huge effort. You know, on the one hand it is the effort to memorize facts and pass exams as if that's somehow gonna be a useful way of bringing human understanding into new lives. But it's also seen as this huge kind of struggle to.
Connect with the worlds to understand the worlds to reach from. These seem, these presumed claw resources that we have called the imagination call human understanding. Yeah. You know, sometimes the story of modern discovery is told as the diminuation, even the humiliation of man, as if you know man had set himself up as the most important thing of the cosmos.
And we've been decented several times, and I think this is all a kind of terrible fiction, a terrible myth that what was the older way of understanding the relationship of humanity, the rest of nature was that humanity's task was to serve the natural world. Mm-hmm. In order to give expression, particularly through language to that which was full in the world around us.
Intellect US means it kind of resonating with the world and then putting words to it, mostly because that was then to offer praise to the creator. Of this world that was humanity's kind of function, a kind of visible, conscious linking of the creator with creatures. But instead, you know, first of all, God becomes a kind of deistic machine operator.
A designer in the sky. Yeah. And that sets the laws and sets everything in motion within a couple of generations, of course, that God starts to drift off. What's the need for the God's active presence in the creation, if it's all being set by laws at the beginning of time. And then of course in the Victorian period, you get atheism being born.
So these things, the theology, the cosmology, the anthropology, all feed into this contraction of what it is to be educated. And it's not, as it were, the discovery of a truth about our humanity that's diminished our humanity. It's a story we're telling ourselves about who we are that. Begins to unfold in Blake's time and now, you know, is fully manifest in ours.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. The participation in the world and bringing our unique capacity of language and perception. Imagination for Blake is obviously a very important theme. So before I, I think we should like, I'm gonna spend a little bit more time trying to understand it before we leave this topic, but I also wanted to kind of refer to a, this beautiful passage I think is in keeping with where you just were, which is, um, to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
That's a beautiful expression of participation and seeing the infinity in just everything in another place. You describe it as a sort of thoroughly engaged kind of being in the world.
Mark Vernon: Yeah. I mean the wonderful thing about Blake is that his diagnosis analysis. It's given in these poetic forms is a once a kind of antidote.
You know, you feel even in a phrase like docs, satanic mills, you know, perhaps one of his best known phrases.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Would you read from that? I mean like, let's give the context for that too. But
Mark Vernon: yeah, so that's from the famous lines that actually come from Blake's poem called Milton, but that's, they're often called Jerusalem now and it's the famous lions and did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England's mountains green and was the Holy Lamb of God on England's peasant pasture scene and did the countenance divine shine forth upon our something hills and was Jerusalem build in here amongst the dark satanic mills.
So that's all a kind of imaginative question. But it's the questioning of doubt, of skepticism, of fearing the contraction that we've been talking about. Yeah. But then Blake says, no, bring me my bow, a burning goal. Bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my spirit. Oh, clouds unfold. Bring me my chariots of fire.
I will not cease from mental fights. This is a key sense in Blake that this is at once about a rediscovery of the world, but that begins with the kind of mental fight to refuse often what you've been told and to trust the imagination once more, I will not see some mental fight, nor will my swords sleep in my hand.
Yeah. Until we've built Jerusalem and England, green and pleasant land. So the dark Satanic mills aren't just a rather colorful expression of factories going across, you know, the industrial landscape. It's actually an imaginative state of mind that factories are a byproduct of. The cosmos has been described as a great mill by Newton and so on, and Satanic for Blake is that state of mind that contracts and narrows and becomes a a and so distances us from the rest of the world much as Satan had been distanced from God.
And so, but the dark Satanic mills is such a rich kind of expression too, that the imagination's actually excited by it, even if it's talking about a certain kind of darkness. And so that leads quite spontaneously to bring me my BOA burning gold and so on. I will not cease from mental fight. The very analysis becomes an invitation to see more.
And I think that there's something very sort of deep going on here, which is that whilst Blake could lament the birth of what we call the modern world now for all the reasons we've been describing, there's something also being born that's good in this contraction, which is a kind of freedom that. Put it like this.
You know, here the two of us are talking about these things. In the medieval world, these kind of discussions would've been the preserve of, you know, learning scholars who probably would've conducted the discussion in Latin, probably were monks had devoted their whole life, you know, to this pursuit of knowledge.
Whereas now this has been democratized. We would say all sorts of people are having these conversations now. There's a kind of freedom of the individual, a valuing of the individual that's born in this contraction into the individual mind. But Blake is saying that freedom needs to be used well to release us again, to cleanse the doors of perception, to see mm-hmm the world in a grain of sand.
That is the beautiful invitation of modern struggle, the mental fight. And so, you know, Blake equips us for that with the energetics as well as the analysis.
Evan Rosa: I can't help but thinking of with respect to the dark Satanic mills, I know you've. Written and have an affinity for Owen Barfield. But I was thinking of another inkling who maybe learned it from Barfield, although, but tolkien's expression of the kind of techn and mechanism and almost, uh, exploitation of the land in Lord of the Rings, as opposed to the deeper integrated wisdom of the ENTs.
That's one of the images I have for Dark Satanic Mill.
Mark Vernon: Well, I mean, Tolkien and Ballfield were both great readers of Blake of course as well. Yeah. And as well CS Lewis. I mean, Sue Lewis didn't like it so much, Blake.
Evan Rosa: He is that right
Mark Vernon: in the great divorce, which in a way is inspired as a counter to the marriage of heaven and hell.
Evan Rosa: Oh my gosh.
Mark Vernon: Yeah. Yeah. Lewis in rational mode can't quite put it together, but, but Tolkien most certainly could. And of course the thing is that. You know, the, the darkness and the light in the lords of the rings are both manifestations of a certain kind of technology. But Uhhuh, the light technology is in dialogue with the world.
It's in communion with the world. Yeah. And the world then releases tremendous powers, you know, for Gandalf and others. Whereas when there's a, when there's a conflict, when the mod is one of extraction
Evan Rosa: Yes.
Mark Vernon: That's when you get the, the destruction of things. Mm-hmm. So, you know, you can reul keen at many levels, but I think there's a deep level to try and read him, which is not against technology at all actually.
It's the manner in which you are relating through your technologies. And Blake talks a lot about abstraction. That's really what he dislikes about the modern science. That you build a model of the cosmos and then somehow feel the cosmos's model is real, more real than reality itself. And the reason why that happens is because the technology that the abstractions enable.
Put immense power into human hands and you know, often for the good as well. But Blake too was a great technologist. I mean, one of the things which he's known for in the art world was his experimentation with materials. And if you'd gone into his workshop with Catherine, his wife, you know, you would've seen copper and iron and smelt the acid on the air and there would be all sorts of colorings and
Evan Rosa: yeah,
Mark Vernon: microscopes to see things with the detail he needed to, and great presses to force the printing and so on.
But the thing is that he knew all these technologies as people. He often writes, you know, all men seen a far, and so the kind of qualities were the personalities of these things he was working with. And, and actually, you know, in many I, one of the people I write about in the book is a friend of mine who's a biochemist, and she has worked well.
She actually worked on the COVID virus, for example.
Evan Rosa: Oh really?
Mark Vernon: And she said that part of her task was actually to befriend.
Evan Rosa: Yes.
Mark Vernon: Even this virus that was doing so much damage because then she could understand it better. Then she could know how to then develop the technologies that might help us to live with this virus actually.
Because of course you can't eliminate it. You have to learn to live with it. And so this befriending, even when there's a kind of antagonism, is absolutely fundamental even to science, you know? And most scientists, when they're sort of down the pub at the end of the day, will talk about what they're studying as if it's a kind of friend that they're getting to know.
In fact, sure. I mean, their whole person is involved in it. It's only officially when they write it up in the paper that they take the subjective stance. So, you know, Blake's not saying anything actually that extraordinary, but. We need to become more conscious of it, I think, because then it will shape the way that education is presented and so on.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. This kind of abstraction goes along with reductionism in some interesting way that like when you have this practice of reductionism and a kind of separation from the object of study, it's easier to abstract it from oneself. It because of the separation that's introduced there. And, and I love the concept of befriending the world.
How do you befriend the natural world except by personifying it in some way to, to allow the dignity of it to come forth.
Mark Vernon: Um, I think this is, see, this is where Blake is actually a challenge to us now because as Barfield puts it, romanticism, which is the poetic engagement with the world, Barfield said it failed to come of age.
And I think that what he means by that is that it failed to really develop an ontology. An understanding for why it was bringing truths back to the human mind.
Evan Rosa: Mm.
Mark Vernon: And Blake, I think, is kind of writing before romanticism became this rather unmoored intensification project. Okay. Which again, is so prevalent in the modern world now.
The intensification of feeling as a proxy for truth is now in all facets of our life. You know, in nationalism, there's the intensification of feeling in psychology, I work as a psychotherapist. The intensification of feeling is somehow supposed to deliver you meaning. And so people go on these extraordinary, intense psychological experiences.
You know, psychedelics is, I think in large part, the latest wave of this.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: As if that's gonna somehow give us connection with the world once more. But it doesn't. It just gives us a wild experience. And the work of so-called integration then remains to be done. So this is all a product of the romantic reaction to the enlightenment.
What it's left us to do is to put down the ontological roots. And so Blake would say that a key part of this is to know that it's not just that we personify the world around us, but that personification is the personality of the world around us, uh, reaching back to us, calling us into a fuller communion once more.
Yeah. And you know, this isn't just knowing as the words. He puts it and the fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees. You know, the tree is its own expression of the divine imagination. Um, that can inspire our imagination therefore, too. But there's the whole spiritual ecology as well. And, you know, maybe you were gonna come to this, but you know, Blake.
He's one of these people that lives with angelic presences all day and every day. He doesn't just have a sort of vague feeling or a vague intuition. There's a kind of intelligence working around us that's manifest in the world around us. But he sees that intelligence, active and present in, you know, what figures through the medieval world and before would've taught, called the angels as these intermediaries of the divine wisdom.
I mean, I, I, this is the real challenge, not to try and psychologize that away, but to instead hold it as a possibility and be drawn more back into it. And I think this is really important for romanticism come of age, um, and one that knows its ontology more fully, and so gets away from. Feeling for feeling psych?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I think it's worth pointing out something I learned from your book in that when we speak of imagination, we're not talking about just fantasy or the fictive necessarily, but rather a participation in what you would think of as a divine imagination, which is a little more reified and realized, and for Blake for it to come out in these visions, right?
I mean, he regularly reported a kind of experience of visions and kind of spiritual or mystical experiences, and it's fascinating to me that you talk about psychologizing those away because I think we see out in the world airing on both sides of this equation over psychologizing certain things from a sort of scientific approach or reduction area approach, and then perhaps over spiritualizing on another side of things, and then looking for some kind of integrated space that might be the sort of maturing.
Coming of age that is on offer here.
Mark Vernon: Well, I think, you know, Blake is like the other mystics of the early modern and into the modern period. I mean, the other figure that Blake loved and apparently quoted all the time was Theresa of Avila. And she too was, you know, a very intelligent person that had these extraordinary experiences.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: Um, in terms of encountering the divine, encountering the angels, you know, in, in Theresa of Avila's pace. This in cases included experiences like levitation and so on. And my sense is that we shouldn't try and explain those things and end up explaining them away. Yeah. But we should hold them as possibilities and see where they can lead us.
And, you know, I'm not saying this is straightforward, but it's listening to those people around us who have these wider and deeper perceptions bringing reason to them. There's absolutely no. Doubt in Blake that discerning what's going on is absolutely fundamental. Otherwise you do just oversize as you are saying.
And you even spiritually bypass, you know, it takes you away from all that's dark and difficult in life. Yeah. Rather than seeing that too is part of the infinity of God. And I think that in a way, this isn't such a big ask, it just depends what you regard as truth bearing. You know, many poets and painters still write about the intelligence of the world.
They write about the wisdom, um, of the fungi, for example. You know, that's in a way
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: A new vista that's opening up to us, you know, and already mycelium has become a kind of meta, a sort of smarter intelligence
Evan Rosa: or even in, in groves of trees.
Mark Vernon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is always a kind of thread to follow here, but.
To really embrace rather than just treating as a whole sort of set of metaphors. Um, you know, metaphors only work actually because they link us to another world that's also here. So I, I feel this is actually for all the chaos and the worry that people have about the modern world. I think strangely, at exactly the same time, there's all sorts of new possibilities which are opening up, which are much, much more participative.
I mean, another one that I've been reading up recently is in biology and the reaching for what's actually being called by Peter Levine, the platonic space that's needed in order to understand what's observed of life in the natural world. You know, many biologists won't talk about this, it's still quite taboo, but the Neo Darwinian consensus where all you need is random mutations and natural selection to explain the rich pageants of life.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,
Mark Vernon: that's long been coming undone. And the imaginative, the participative. Even the, what you might call the non-natural, and hence in Peter Levine's references to platonic space.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: You know, that which is where exists stakes outside of nature that deeply influences nature. I mean, that's a whole other rabbit hole to go down, but I only mention it to say, I think these things are becoming part of actually the mainstream discussion again too.
So for those of us who are, you know, in love with the angels and prepared to be guided by them, you know, be guided into these new conversations as well, because I think Blake, you know, would very much have encouraged us to do so.
Evan Rosa: Mark Blake's relationship to Christianity is an interesting one. He has been disassociated from it in certain readings at times, but the fact is he has such a rich treatment of Christian themes and biblical themes, and you articulate a V version of Blake that is far more deeply Christian than we might expect.
How would you introduce us to Blake, the Christian?
Mark Vernon: Well, one way of starting is to look at a very early little pamphlet to Blake called There's no Natural Religion, which already is saying a whole lot. You know, he's resisting the attempt to psychologize religion to turn it into a sociological phenomena, to do the dare stick turn, if you like.
And that little pamphlet ends with this statement. Therefore, God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is. Therefore, God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is. And he's referring of course to the central. Well, I was gonna say moments in Christianity, which is a historic moment, but it's also an ever present moment, Blake would say that's happening in us, which is the incarnation,
Evan Rosa: ah,
Mark Vernon: it's the meeting of the human and the divine, the meeting of the infinite and the finite.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: Now that can seem to Protestant or post reformation is somewhat a radical statement, you know, is this somehow the ification of man and so on. But it's actually of course a completely standard remark from the early church period. Um, in the first few centuries. Every great theologian Clements of Alexander, Gregory of Nisa, Leo, the great whatever, they all, um, make this a, a variance on this understanding that God becomes as we are, that we may be as he's and Blake, I think, is so thoroughly Christian because he takes that so thoroughly, seriously.
It leads to a kind of mysticism that is at once, that completely within, but was also within all things, therefore. He says in Jerusalem, the emanation of the John Albian, God speaks to Blake. Blake says, I heard the word of the divine voice saying, I'm not a God of far off. I'm a brother and a friend. I'm in you and you are in me.
Mutual in love, divine. This is, you know, the great insight of the mystics. And Blake. Therefore, I think it's thoroughly Christian. He's very inspired, I think, by other traditions too. Um, he reads the bag of agita. I think he probably read Sufi text even. I understand that some soup texts were being translated in London at the time, but they, for him, speak to what had got lost or was struggling to be heard within Christian mysticism, um, which is this realization of the divine freedom.
And so, you know, when he reads the Bible, he says the Bible is an inspired text. That's why it's still being read 1800 years, 2000 years on. But the inspiration is not as a word found on the surface of the page. It's found because your engagement with the Bible, with the text opens up this third space.
It's in between you and the Bible that the divine voice is heard. And you know, this again, had been a standard way of reading the Bible in terms of understanding it, allegorically as someone like origin. And then all the church fathers would've said, um, you know, when Augustine writes his book, the Literal Meaning of Genesis, it's not like a quick summary of Seven Days of Creation.
Bang. That's it. It's like a multi-volume work. Because Augustine says, to understand the literal meaning of Genesis, you've got to become participative with the spirit of what this text is unfolding. And that takes a long time. It takes discernment, it takes study, it takes reflection, it takes the imagination, and then the deep truth, which is the literal meaning for Augustine.
And you know the meaning that most matters if you like, starts to reveal itself. Yeah. So Blake's in this long tradition of reading the Bible, of understanding the divine presences within oneself, but also all things,
Evan Rosa: the idea that we can somehow achieve understanding in such a quick pass or with so little time or so little of ourselves put into it.
It really doesn't appreciate, as we have been talking about earlier in the conversation, who we are, who God is, and what it means for God and man to be connected and for what, what it means for humanity to experience. God in a transcendent way or experience the world in a transcendent way.
Mark Vernon: Thank you. Uh, that's obviously right.
I mean, you know, the word transcendent for Blake often comes through as eternal. You know, he, he says, I labor night and day to bring the eternal worlds to man when he talks about the world in a grain of sand and so on. There's almost the schema in Blake. It's not quite, because that would become not being led by impulse and the imagination, but to risk confusing the territory for the map.
But there is a sense in Blake that there's a kind of narrow vision, which has its own imagination, but it's always got this tendency to close down. And this is the Euro single vision and Newton sleep, he calls it. Then there's a sort of second level of imagination, which realizes that the cycles in life, he calls it generation quite often.
It's the sort of pulse, the etheric, if you like, that we can know in life as well. And Blake says, that's better because. It's starting to become freer. But then there's a third level, which he calls Buhler and Buhler. He says, sleeps at the door of eternity. And Buhler is the kind of more ecstatic sense of experience that we can have.
He actually often likens it to the sexual, to the erotic and other greats theme in Blake that gets Optum forced outta Christianity. Sort of put in the confines of marriage as if that's gonna deal with all of our erotic troubles, if you like. But erotic is a huge part of Blake's spirituality as well, because it's the yearning for communion.
It's been drawn by that, which is felt to be beautiful. It wants to bring good into life,
Evan Rosa: which is to say that the erotic is just the desiring. It's an expression of desire. It's not necessarily an our modern understanding of, of eroticism. It's a sort of an appeal to the deeply desiring aspect of who we are.
Mark Vernon: And Blake, he can certainly tell you how your desire can be distorted. Uh, more and more is the cry of a mistaken soul, he says, of modern consumerism. But he doesn't say, therefore stop desiring. He says, no desire a right because that is absolutely necessary to understand and to participate in the eternal, to come back to, you know, this notion of the eternal.
So he says, less than all cannot satisfy man because we're made for God. You know, if God becomes as we are, so we might be as God is, the all is our destiny. Not some sort of constrained, controlled, ized version of the all.
Evan Rosa: The figure of Christ is obviously very important for him as well. And Blake said that Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules.
And I think it helps by hearkening back to. Where we started with his rationalistic context and the way he was moving against that grain, moving against, let's say utilitarianism or moving against con and the categorical imperative and, and this idea that Jesus was acting from something much deeper inside himself.
I would love to hear you speak a little bit about Blake's understanding of Christ.
Mark Vernon: Yeah. So Christ is God. There's absolutely no two ways about it in Blake and Christ comes to us very often in Blake in the moment of need, even at the point of dying. Mm-hmm. Because that's when we have to give up a narrow sense of who we are and then the divine life can be born in us and Christ is all virtue means, therefore, that it's in Christ very character running right through.
Hall of Christ's personality to be constantly turning to the divine. Mm-hmm. And that's the impulse. It's like spirit that blows where it wills. Yeah. Christ is perfectly aligned to that. Whereas rules are in attempt to describe that sort of pause it if you like, which can often be with good motive. And sometimes in life we need a few rules, but they're always only an approximation.
And if you stick by the rules too rigidly, then actually you lose the spirit. Right. You know, an observation that St. Paul made of course as well.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Mark Vernon: And so I think this, this idea that that's the kind of understanding of ourselves that we need follows. I mean, it used to be called virtue ethics. The love and the hate is a word runs through your hearts, not just through the body politic.
Yeah. And so learning to navigate it within yourself is absolutely a prerequisite to learning to navigate the civil world as well. And of course, you know, when you. Make morality a calculation, a rule, you lose that capacity to navigate it. And you know, lo and behold, what that first seemed like, a good move, making a rule actually dehumanizes you and others around you.
But Blake points out, he has a lot of fun pointing out that Christ loved to break the 10 Commandments quite as much as uphold them. You must hate your father and your mother. It ought to be a follower of mine. Or of course, there's all the stuff about the Sabbath being made for man and not man the Sabbath.
And, but the point is that it's not breaking the rules for some sort of anarchic delight. It's because that which the rules we're trying to capture has been perceived more deeply. And it's, it's very common actually in spiritual writing. Spiritual leaders of any authenticity. You know, they might tell you one thing, one moment, and then almost completely the opposite.
The next one moment in Jesus, um, is telling a follower to give up everything they have and then they'll be able to follow him. But in the next moment, he's welcoming. The anointing with the oil that cost, you know, a fortune as it were. So, and this is because he's always in contact with the divine moment.
And there's a wonderful expression I love in Blake where he says, there's a moment in each day that Satan cannot find nor, and his watch friends find it. But the industrious find this moment and it multiply. And when it once is found, it renovates every moment of the day, if rightly placed. And it's that if rightly placed, that we're talking about this kind of being aware of the divine moment that Satan, the contractive view can't see, but becoming industrious.
Becoming renovated. This active kind of language that Blake uses. If we can place that impulse the right way in our daily lives, then we'll be living with the spirit.
Evan Rosa: Absolutely. He painted. Christ so many times. I'm curious if there's another figure besides Christ or some expression of God that he painted more in that.
And so I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you to comment a little bit on the illumination of his poetry in particular with his art. I mean, it's close to a, a, a kind of graphic novel. It's, it's a kind of graphic expression of his ideas that he's trying to do, and it really is this excellent example of bringing things together, bringing, you know, form and matter.
Even
Mark Vernon: the brilliant thing about imagery, which you get in graphic novels too, is that that which is interior can be expressed externally on the page.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: The very best graphic novels, they're geniuses. That's what they do. And Blake does something similar, I think. So for example, one of the ways in which he very, as you say, very frequently paints Jesus, is by capturing moments in the gospel stories, but the moments and the way that Blake captures them.
They sort of defamiliarize and then release the interior significance of the story or the encounter. I mean, the one, one of the ones which I discussed in the book I absolutely love is the way that Blake portrays the story in John of the woman caught an adultery.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: And the moment that Blake chooses is when Jesus has said, let the one without sin cast the first stone.
And so all her accusers are moving away. And you see in the foreground, Jesus kneeling down to right in the dirt the second time. Yeah. And the woman stood there and it's unclear as she free, she's actually bound with her hands behind her back, which is a detail that Blake adds. Of course. And in a way, this is a moment where the woman is suspended between the contrary because of course we know, and readers of the gospel will know that Jesus is the one without sin and so could cast the first stone.
It's not quite clear what's gonna happen next. So she's suspended between life and. But of course, Jesus, by this point in John's Gospel, chapter eight, is also himself starting to be suspended between death and life because his accusers are already thinking ways to destroy him. And so the woman and Jesus, in the way that Blake portrays them, are actually starting to be identified.
And I think this is why Jesus is leaning down. It's not just to write in the sound, but it becomes a sort of bow to her Divinity as well, which he knows in himself. And so that's gonna be her release. It's a judgment, but it's a judgment to liberate, not so is to condemn. And so this is amazing unfolding that Blake portrays in his image of Jesus, in this case, bowing.
It looks like he's just illustrating the story writing in the sand, but actually it's her and him becoming identified, recognizing each other. That's gonna be her liberation. So, you know, he can say, go and sin no more. Not just as a kind of moral instruction, but because she would've recognized the Divinity in her, which is beyond the sinful as well.
And that's gonna be what really guides her in life. Yeah. So the way that Blake paints Jesus multiple times, it always, when you contemplate the image opens up the deep interior truth of the scene in the gospel or of the moment that Blake is capturing.
Evan Rosa: And that leads me to my final question for you. And it's, it is also the way you and the book, this way that Blake Reen chance the World. It's an invitation to re-enchantment for those who have been overly reduced or disintegrated. And you say that's found by stepping into the infinity. Of each moment and your book is called Awake.
I think you end the book really beautifully in the chapter fountains of Living Waters. And I was wondering if you could just make some comments about this because I think it's an inspiring way to leave this conversation. And the final four lines of Blake that you end with are beautiful as well. I'd love for you to read those.
Mark Vernon: So this is where the apocalyptic comes in another, you know, core part of the Christian tradition. And Blake understands the apocalyptic, he could speak Greek and he understands it as an unveiling, like you know, the Greek for truth is an unveiling. So the apocalyptic is the unveiling of the reality of things.
And for Blake, this happens moment by moment. It's not something that we need to await, sort of sit around. He's very much with Luke on this. You know, the kingdom of God is within you. Some will say it's coming here, some will say it's coming there. Know the kingdom of God. It's within you. And Blake says, you know, a final judgment passes through the soul of every man when they recognize truth.
So this can be something that happens in every moment of the day.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Mark Vernon: And then, I mean, this last chapter book was called The Fountains of Living Water because Blake says what happens then is that the furnaces of affliction, the difficulties, the mental fight in every day become fountains of living water.
It's in the very struggle that something gets released. And so he ends Jerusalem, the emanation of the giant Albion, with this great kind of apocalyptic vision, um, where the old antagonists of Bacon, Newton and Locke.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Mark Vernon: Join hands with the great champions of the imagination, Choa, Shakespeare and Milton.
The divine spears of the intellect are thrown down from the skies.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Mark Vernon: And you get this beatific vision that unfolds. And right at the end of Jerusalem and Blake, quite often at the end of these great moments in his poems, he then returns us to our everyday life because he says that's where we experience these things.
Um, it's not something of a peak experience that we need to kind of hang around to, to wait to occur again. No, he always wants us to know this. Right in the middle of the every day. Yeah. So he ends Jerusalem, the image of the Ian, and with these lines, he says, all human forms identified, even tree, metal, earth and stone, all human forms identified.
And what he means by that is that this is, again, the human calling to give conscious, visible expression to the intelligence that's in all things, including metal, earth and stone. That is part of what the apocalypse will be about living, going forth. And then he continues and returning weed into the planetary lives of years, months, days and hours.
Reposing. So this is in the middle of our mortal life. This immortality can awaken and then awakening into his bosom. So that's Jesus' bosom in the life of immortality. It's tic, you might say. That's the way we've gotta understand the chronological time of our lives.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Kairos like just the most fitting time, not Kronos, but kairos.
Yeah.
Mark Vernon: It's kind of, kairos is held within Kronos. Um, it's a bit like, you know, the ruins of time builds mansions in eternity. Blake says, I'm the always the coming together in the S that make for the divine vision.
Evan Rosa: Well, mark, I think you're doing something really important in bringing Blake to our contemporary moment and you've really brought him alive to me and I'm really grateful for that.
And I'm grateful for our time talking.
Mark Vernon: Thank you for creating the possibility because I think it's in the talking, you know, much like I was saying, to understand language is to have an experience of the imagination that's given to us. It's in the talking that these things come alive. I'm, I wonder whether podcasts and song are actually part of the spiritual yearning above times, the slightly unformed conversations that in the moment there's a moment in each day that something can be released.
So I hope that people listening in have felt that as well, because I think that is the movement of the spirit, right? You know, within us.
Evan Rosa: It is worth pointing out the way that, um, new realities and understandings can be. And often are only formed in conversation
Mark Vernon: very much. You know, dialogue goes all the way back to Plato.
I mean, there's a reason for that.
Evan Rosa: That's right. Thank you, mark,
for the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Mark Vernon, production assistance by Noah Sentil. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith dot Yale edu or life worth living dot Yale edu.
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