How incapable I was of understanding anything like the ideals of a William Blake! How could I possibly realize that his rebellion, for all its strange heterodoxies, was fundamentally the rebellion of the saints. It was the rebellion of the lover of the living God, the rebellion of one whose desire of God was so intense and irresistible that it condemned, with all its might, all the hypocrisy and petty sensuality and skepticism and materialism which cold and trivial minds set up as unpassable barriers between God and the souls of men. -- Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain pg. 96.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Quote of the Day
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Have you ever read Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell? Your quote reminded me of the poem. It always makes me think of tantric complementarity and dependent co-arising because the two parties, apparently opposite, need one another for wholeness - neither is healthy when there is a divine "authority" figure over-and-against a demonized "rebel" (it's a dysfunctional rather than integrated relationship). But when the angel is demon and the demon is angel and heaven and hell are married - redemption, creativity, freedom. The poem asks for that kind of interpretation, too, in speaking about an "opposition" which is true friendship between the rebellious prophet and the angel, whose "phantasies" impose upon one another (dependent origination). It's as if the poem is a kind of mandala, with a wrathful deity (at once angel/demon) at its center. It's not very likely that Blake was thinking about any of this, but you can imagine the poem as a template for a kind of Vajrayana Christianity!
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