John Keats's Gnostic Theodicy or Moral Ontology: the Vale of Soul-Making

"The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary imposition of God and taken to Heaven--What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion! Call the world if you Please 'The Vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world...Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence--There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls...till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. I[n]telligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God--how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain [sic] religion--or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation--This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--These three Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity...I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School--and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a Wold of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!...As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence--This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity..."

The foregoing lines are found in a famous letter that John Keats wrote to his brother (George) and sister-in-law in the Spring of 1819. In that letter, Keats outlined what I would term his "gnostic theodicy" or "moral ontology," but which he called "a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity." The degree to which this "faint sketch" resembles various Muslim accounts of the worldly career of the human being is quite uncanny; it is especially comparable to Baba Afzal's hikmah.

Of course, many Muslim pietists might argue that Keats only gets it half-right: the creation (or moral definition) of individual character (khulq) should produce within the transfigured spark that Keats names a "soul" a longing to be reunited with the divine source of that original intelligence or spark. According to this view, the sculpting of the perfected self over the course of a lifetime is actually preparation for the final leg of the journey--which is accomplished by means of ecstasy-inducing exercises and which, in turn, prepare the practitioner for death.

For Keats, Soul-making is an end in itself; for the vast majority of Muslims who are not pietists, on the other hand, Soul-making--though essential to salvation--is not an end in itself but, rather, a preparation for Judgment Day.

For most Muslims, ecstatic "tastes" of future bliss are not deemed necessary milestones on the road to eternity: that sort of experience is reserved to the "spiritual athletes," the adepts. Even so, there is an ordinary ecstasy of the everyday available to any who would "taste" it--and without which one's rice bowl is regrettably empty. Let those who hunger taste and see.