“[William] Blake saw official Christendom as a narrowing of vision, a foreclosure of experience and of future expansion, a locking up and securing of the doors of perception. He substituted for it a Christianity of openness, of total vision, a faith which dialectically embraces both extremes, not seeking to establish order in life by shutting off a little corner of chaos and subjecting it to laws and to police, but moving freely between dialectical poles in a wild chaos, integrating sacred vision, in and through the experience of fallenness, as the only locus of creativity and redemption. Blake, in other words, calls for a ‘whole new form of theological understanding’…”
Thomas Merton, reviewing Thomas J. J. Altizer’s The New Apocalypse: The radical Vision of William Blake, published in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton edited by Patrick Hart.
A wonderful quote, a beautiful vision. Thanks for sharing both Paul.
Posted by: Jason Goroncy | Sunday, 05 February 2012 at 08:37 PM