Dante, Blake and the Revelation of Unity

with Mark Vernon

Unity has become a problem in our times. It is not hard to find people who argue that “no man is an island”, to recall the words of John Donne, or that there are intimate links between the sciences and the arts: “imagination is more important than knowledge,” wrote Albert Einstein, because imagination brings over the horizon more that we might be able to understood. What has gone missing, though, is where the one and the many, the arts and the sciences, come from and where they might lead. Dante and William Blake explored this wellspring, which is also the point of return. In the Divine Comedy, Dante sees how the more the individual becomes all they might be, the more they connect with everything else that is. In his poetry and art, William Blake discovers that the “arrows of the intellect” all flow from the Absolute. We have lost what Ibn ‘Arabi called “the oneness of being”, which allows for diversity, indeed rejoices in diversity, because each person and activity is known as a reflection or echo of the One. Dante and Blake are writers who can help us see as well as affirm the truth that lies beneath and within all things.