Faith & Spirit Quote by William Blake

Blake kicks down the door on the polite Enlightenment split between meat and spirit. In a culture learning to trust microscopes, factory clocks, and empirical “common sense,” he insists the body isn’t a lower, detachable module; it’s soul made legible. The provocation is surgical: what you call “Body” is not the enemy of holiness but a mode of perception, a “portion of Soul” revealed through sensation. That move doesn’t spiritualize the body so much as detoxify it from centuries of Christian suspicion toward flesh.

The phrasing matters. “That called Body” sneers at the authority of labels, suggesting “Body” is an administrative category, not a metaphysical fact. Then Blake turns the five senses into “chief inlets,” as if the soul is not trapped in the body but actively ventilated by it. Subtext: anyone selling purity through denial of desire, appetite, or physical experience is selling a smaller soul.

“This age” is the sly anchor. Blake isn’t making an abstract claim; he’s diagnosing modernity’s narrowed bandwidth. If the senses are the main gateways now, it’s because society has trained people to recognize only what can be measured, bought, or disciplined. Yet he also leaves room for expansion: if these are the chief inlets “in this age,” other ages might open other doors.

Contextually, it’s Blake the radical dissenter, writing against both institutional religion and mechanistic materialism. He refuses their shared assumption that spirit and matter are rivals. For him, the stakes are political as much as mystical: reclaiming the body from repression is a way of reclaiming the imagination from authority.