Heaven's Gate

I give you a golden string Only wind it into a ball It will lead you in at Heaven's Gate built in Jerusalem's wall. ~ William Blake

“Many Christians and Christian sects, which ought logically to cherish this world as the approved work of God and thus as a good gift and a privilege, regard it instead as a trap or prison from which the soul must escape by repudiating its earthly life and accepting a formula for “salvation.” This sort of spirituality is little more than materialism’s second face, for it abandons the world and our economic life in it to the materialists. This curious alliance is opposed, and perhaps is opposable only, by the vision of the completeness of reality that is said to underlie the traditional cultures and religions of the world.

This vision—attested by scholars and authorities far more learned than I am, though certainly confirmed by my own experience and reading—sees the “outer” world as continuous with and dependent upon “inner” realities such as love, reverence, goodness, and beauty. These realities, though they have belonged always to the actual lives of most people, the materialists dismiss as intangible and therefore unreal. The religious dualists see them perhaps as real enough, while, like the materialists, seeing them also as irrelevant to the natural life and human economy of this world.

The consequent estrangement of body and soul, Heaven and Earth, time and eternity, leading to the further estrangements of utility and beauty, work and pleasure, and all the rest of the divisions and divorces of our mechanical civilization, is owing to the loss of the ancient unifying vision by which we have been enabled to see in the world the eternal light that everywhere informs it. This vision, this immemorial knowledge and way of knowing, survives only marginally in the modern world. Inherently opposed as it is to the radical simplifications of the materialist explainers and devisers, it is assuredly the losing (though never the lost) side. And yet its diminishment or depreciation is just as assuredly consequential in the lives of people and the world.”

~ Kathleen Jessie Raine (1908 –2003) was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founding member of the Temenos Academy.