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William Blake's Urizen
For what is idolatry?
Man’s faith in the reflected world of material ‘reality’, i.e. the thought petrified, the world that man himself does not understand that he himself has shaped.
Faith in a material world apart translates too readily into faith in a god apart, a Urizen. (See The Mythology)
However, that very same shaping force of thought is one with the Logos, before it is debased.
Faith in a world and god apart is overcome where the incarnation of the Logos is realised in human corporeality, i.e. consciously realised.
Incarnation is realised in the dawning of consciousness that leaves the ‘I’ with one task.
The ‘I’ is the ‘I’ because it has the force of the Logos within it. It has only one task - to be the ‘I’ that it is to be according to the Logos, not according to to the soul’s subjection to corporeality. the task is actualised in freedom from idolatry, from Urizen.
This is not about the ‘I’ alone, i.e. the Giovanni Gentile error. It is rather the ‘I’ within which the originatory principle dwells.
To be according to the Logos is a reawakening, a resurrection that followed the incarnation. The death from which the ‘I’ was resurrected was the immersion in the reflected world of material ‘reality’, i.e. the world of Nature that is the ‘I’s’ own shaping power of thought reflected back to it as ready-made ‘reality’.
Immersion in Nature is to be one with Nature, i.e. one in mythological terms with Ananke, where 1=0.
And the One was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the world was one to me, and I was indistinguishable from it. (Ancient Terror)
Immersion in Nature means that, at best, man will have rational and philosophical, or even cerebral knowledge of it, as well as concrete experience of it only as a physical ego.
Re-birth, whilst made possible by the impulse of the Logos, i.e. the ‘I’s’ encounter with the Logos, demands that a choice be made. ‘To be according to the Logos’ is a‘free act’ and, being free, can be accepted or rejected. The temptationto reject is that of rejecting the light of the Logos and choosing instead to follow the Prince of Darkness, i.e the Prince of the corporeal world, Urizan, making an idol of thought petrified.
The encounter with the Logos is the encounter with Love; God is Love.
The‘I’, immersed in Nature, subject to Ananke, worshipping Urizen, is intimately awakened to its one task by the impulse of Love. The germ, initiatory conception of the principle of the ‘I’, is the encounter with Love.
© John Dunn.
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