one from eternity, sundered by the separative creation or fall, severed into type and antitype by bodily generation, but to be made one again when life and death shall both have died;) not greater than the human nature, but greater than the qualities which the human nature assumes upon earth. God is man, and man God; as neither of himself the greater, so neither of himself the less: but as God is the unfallen part of man, man the fallen part of God, God must needs be (not more than man, but assuredly) more than the qualities of man. Thus the mystic can consistently deny that man's moral goodness or badness can be predicable of God, while at the same time he affirms man's intrinsic divinity and God's intrinsic humanity. Man can only possess abstract qualities—"allegoric virtues"—by reason of that side of his nature which he has not in common with God: God, not partaking of the "generative nature," cannot partake of qualities which exist only by right of that nature. The other "God"[1] or "Angel of the Presence" who created the sexual and separate body of man did but cleave in twain the "divine humanity," which becoming reunited shall redeem man without price and without covenant and without law; he meantime, the Creator,[2] is a divine
- ↑ In the line "A God or else a Pharisee," Blake with a pencil-scratch has turned "a God" to "a devil"; as if the words were admittedly or admissibly interchangeable! A prophet so wonderfully loose-tongued may well be the despair of his faithfullest commentators: but as it happens the pencil-scratch should here be of some help and significance to us: following this small clue, we may come to distinguish the God of his belief from this demon-god of the created "mundane shell"—the God of Pharisaic religion and moral law.
- ↑ The creator by division, father of men and women, fashioner of evil and good; literally in the deepest sense "the God of this world," who "does not know the garment from the man;" cannot see beyond the two halves which he has made by violence of separation; would have the body perishable, yet the
