How to Read William Blake: Imagination and Flourishing Beyond Reason Alone / Mark Vernon

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.

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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."

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About Mark Vernon