Apocatastasis Now
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall.
— WILLIAM BLAKE
"In 'Apocatastasis Now: A Very Condensed Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem' (JBSSJ [Journal of the Blake Society at St James's] 6 [2001] 18–25), Susanne Sklar argues that Blake is not apocalyptic but apocatastatic, that is (following a doctrine of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) he believes that all free creatures will be redeemed by God's universal love."
— The Year's Work in English Studies, 2003: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 493-547
Related material:
From the website of Philip Pullman,
president of The Blake Society:
"I must create a System…"
The Blake Society, 25 October 2005: St James’s Church, Piccadilly
I see that the title of this lecture is given as BLAKE'S DARK MATERIALS. Now in the lecturer's handbook, the second rule says "You need take no obsessive notice of the title that has been announced in advance." Whether Blake's materials are dark or not I couldn't really say, but I am going to talk about Blake, partly, and partly about religion. Appropriate, perhaps, in a place like this, but you might think not appropriate from someone whose reputation is that of a scoffer or mocker or critic of religion; but I haven't come here to scoff or mock. Nor have I come here to recant, as a matter of fact. I'm profoundly interested in religion, and I think it's extremely important to understand it. I've been trying to understand it all my life, and every so often it's useful to put one's thoughts in order; but I shall never like God.
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For more dark materials
from the Halloween season
of 2005 — in fact, from the
very date of Pullman's lecture–
see
Darkness Doubled.
