The Doors of Perception

Imagination as Theology

Blake’s central claim is that the imagination is not a faculty for producing fictions but the means by which human beings participate in divine reality. What Blake resists, with ferocious consistency, is what he calls “single vision” — the reduction of reality to what can be measured, managed, and controlled. His target is the philosophical position that treats the measurable world as the only real world, that reduces the human being to a mechanism, and that closes off the dimension of transcendence.

What Songs of Innocence and Experience Reveals

The two contrary states of the human soul that Blake maps are not simply childhood and adulthood. Innocence, for Blake, is the state of the soul that perceives the divine in the ordinary. Experience is the state of the soul that has learned the lesson of the fallen world. Blake does not resolve this tension by choosing one state over the other. The goal is what he calls “organized innocence” — the recovery, through Experience, of a vision that knows the darkness and yet maintains its perception of the divine. This is the structure of resurrection faith.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict whose deepest dimension, for Blake, is the war between imagination and what he calls “the mind-forged manacles.” The seed of the serpent, in Blake’s mythology, is Urizen: the faculty of cold reason and law that imposes limits on the infinite human spirit.

Blake’s entire prophetic project is a form of resistance to Urizen — an insistence that the human being is made for more than what the material world, as conventionally perceived, can offer. In this resistance he is, despite his heterodoxy, a witness to something the gospel affirms: that the human being is made in the image of an infinite God, and that any account of the human that leaves out that infinity has left out what matters most.

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