Fiction May Be, Whatever Else, An Exercise

When The Reformation Became Established, One Of The Things That Was A Question Between Catholicism And The Reformation Traditions Was Whether There Was A Hierarchy Of Being. If You Look At Thomas Aquinas, For Example, You Have Hierarchies Of Angels And All The Rest Of It, And Hierarchies Even Of Saints And Then Subsaints - People Who Aren't Quite There, That Sort Of Thing. The Reformation Rejected All Of That And Created A New Metaphysics, In Effect, That Is Not Hierarchical.

Everything That Falls Upon The Eye Is Apparition, A Sheet Dropped Over The World's True Workings. The Nerves And The Brain Are Tricked, And One Is Left With Dreams That These Specters Loose Their Hands From Ours And Walk Away, The Curve Of The Back And The Swing Of The Coat So Familiar As To Imply That They Should Be Permanent Fixtures Of The World, When In Fact Nothing Is More Perishable.

Isaac Watts, Of Course, Is A Hymn Writer In The Tradition Of Congregationalism Who Lived In The Seventeenth And Early Eighteenth Century. He Is Very Interesting And Important Because He Was Also A Metaphysician. He Knew A Great Deal About What Was, For Him, Contemporary Science. He Was Very Much Influenced By Isaac Newton, For Example. There Are Planets And Meteors And So On Showing Up In His Hymns Very Often. But, Again, The Scale Of His Religious Imagination Corresponds To A Very Generously Scaled Scientific Imagination.

The Moon Looks Wonderful In This Warm Evening Light, Just As A Candle Flame Looks Beautiful In The Light Of Morning. Light Within Light...it Seems To Me To Be A Metaphor For The Human Soul, The Singular Light Within That Great General Light Of Existence.

Fact Explains Nothing. On The Contrary, It Is Fact That Requires Explanation.