@jasonwblakely 6/ Blake isn't a flourish here. He gives the argument teeth. Every system—every treatise, every academy—is downstream of the Poetic Genius: fire before doctrine, wound before concept, word before theory, a depth realm where reality becomes revelation.
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1/ At the theo-experiential seam, Islam has an easier time with the Zwickau archetype. Blake, not unnaturally, is apt: “The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius, which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy.” Philosophy is both fulfilled in and surpassed by genuine prophecy that is revelatory. (Both von Baader and Schelling indicate this.) Bonaventure says prophets know better than philosophers, even when they assert the same thing, since prophesy arrives at truth all at once, while philosophy must reason through logical steps. The issue then, reconciliation. Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn 'Arabi, Shah Wali Allah, Mulla Sadra and key Islamic poets comprehensively address the tension. Thanks, in part, to his context, al-Ghazali may have secured the fullest assimilative embrace at the planetary level. Subtweet: 3/ This is why “just change the theology” is naive and “theology doesn’t matter” is equally so. The gods we confess are late justifications until they become the only language in which a community can hear judgment on its idols and imagine an order beyond its interests.
Open original document@alastairmci @WaltBrueggemann Brueggemann, on it, always. Compare Blake: “The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius, which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy.” The poet as miracle worker, not of the last word, but the first, opening the way.
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And so there comes a time - I believe we are in such a time - when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new. The power which makes all things new is magic. What our time needs is mystery: what our time needs is magic. Who would not say that only a miracle can save us? Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind; Apocalypse