A reader got in touch after yesterday’s piece on William Blake and the Paolozzi statue of Newton outside the British Library. They ask how I explain Blake’s apparent madness. My first response is to say I don’t see any madness in Blake.
I don’t see Blake’s visions, his angels, his epics, his myth-making as signs of insanity. Rather, I see them as acts of knowing. That he lived outside the bounds of what most people even then called reasonable is not a problem to solve. It’s part of what makes him trustworthy.
Yes, he saw angels in trees and eternity in the sun. But his visions never narrowed the world, as they tend to do in the minds of some lunatics. In fact, they expanded it. He didn’t wield his visions to control others or declare war on outsiders, as some lunatics might do. What anger he did feel was always aimed at hypocrisy, cruelty, and the deadening of the soul. What he wanted wasn’t submission. It was awakening.
Inside the British Library, just a few feet from Newton’s statue, sits the only surviving manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe. It holds another life that is often dismissed as uncontainable.
Most people don’t weep in public. Fewer still weep in churches, or in marketplaces, or on pilgrimages through Europe. Margery Kempe did all of that and more. And people hated it.
She wasn’t a nun. She was a merchant’s daughter from King’s Lynn. She was born around 1373 and married a man named John. She was illiterate. She was mother of fourteen children. After the birth of her first child, she went out of her mind, as she put it, screaming, seeing devils, refusing food. Today we might call it postpartum psychosis. Then, it was either sin or possession.
Eventually she recovered. But she was changed. She had a vision of Christ, radiant and tender, and slowly gave herself over to a life of devotion, chastity, pilgrimage, and tears. Not symbolic ones. Real, physical, loud, unstoppable crying.
In The Book of Margery Kempe, which she dictated to two different scribes late in life, she recalls how her tears began:
“And then she was stirred in her mind that she should go to Jerusalem and Rome… and when she remembered the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, she could not but cry and roar and weep, as if she had seen him with her bodily eyes.”
That’s how she lived. She wept when she saw a crucifix. She wept when she saw a mother with a child. She wept during Mass. She wept on the road to Calvary in Jerusalem so loudly that people asked if someone had died. She explains her crying not as disorder, but as gift, a divine stirring of the heart:
“For the fire of love burnt so mightily in her soul, that she could not keep it within, but cried and roared and wept with great sobbings and sighings.”
That’s what she calls it. Fire. Not hysteria. Not sentiment. Not emotional excess. Fire.
There’s an extraordinary honesty in that. She refuses the tidiness of piety. She resists the social expectation to suffer silently. She lets the grief of the world move through her, as if in solidarity with all who suffer. She makes the Incarnation visible in the most raw way possible, through a human body, breaking open in love.
There’s another woman of the same period who is better known to us, Julian of Norwich. Julian lived enclosed in a cell beside a church. She too had visions, and a profound mystical theology. But her writing is interior, composed, serene. She listens, whereas Margery wails. Julian retreats inward. Margery hits the road. And yet, they met. Margery visited Julian to seek discernment. Julian listened and told her to trust what she had seen.
That encounter moves me. Two women outside the usual channels of authority, trying to describe the shape of the sacred in their lives. Julian silent, Margery weeping. Both of them faithful.
A lot of my writing is about Stoicism, and I know what some readers might assume. That Margery Kempe is everything the Stoics warn against. Overcome by passion. Moved by spectacle. Unrestrained.
But that’s a shallow reading of both her and the Stoics.
The Stoics didn’t forbid grief. Seneca mourned his child. Marcus Aurelius wrote tenderly about the death of loved ones. Epictetus spoke of crying as a natural response, provided we know what we are crying for. Stoicism isn’t about being unaffected. It’s about integration and alignment. Stoicism invites us to cast our emotions into the wider internal landscape where reason and virtue are also present and pointing in the same direction.
Margery’s tears don’t constitute emotional chaos. In a very profound way they are actually a form of moral clarity. She weeps because she sees suffering clearly. Because the love of Christ is not abstract to her. Because injustice isn’t theoretical. She weeps not because she is weak, but because the world is.
It’s worth saying here that not all who claim religious vision are like this. We live in a time crowded with voices that claim visions and use faith as weapons to establish empires. Margery’s crying, however, wasn’t about power. It wasn’t about control, or punishment, or self-elevation. It cost her everything: status, safety, respect. And still, she wept.
She didn’t cry to condemn the world. She cried because she loved it. Her visions made her more porous, not more certain. What moved through her wasn’t rage or dogma, but grief, awe, and a longing for mercy.
“And then our Lord said to her soul, ‘I shall weep and mourn in thee, for thou mayest not bear the weeping and mourning that I shall weep in thee.’”
That line is devastating. Her crying isn’t just hers. It is God’s. It is the Logos, not cold, not clinical, but incarnate, wounded, burning.
That, to me, is where the Stoic and the Mystic meet. Not in the denial of emotion, but in the refusal to be fake. To see the world as it is. To name what hurts. And to act, speak, or weep in ways that stay loyal to that truth, even when it costs everything.
Margery Kempe is not easy. She was called mad, heretical, attention-seeking. But she kept going. She insisted on being visible. On being heard. On making the life of the soul as public as a procession. And somehow, across six centuries, her voice still carries.
Last night, with all this stuff churning around in my mind, I listened to Arvo Pärt’s Credo. It begins with clarity, the calm of a C major chord. Then the music shatters. Dissonance breaks in. Voices scream. The piano crashes against itself. But faith doesn’t disappear. Instead, it’s dragged through the chaos.
And then, somehow, the stillness returns. And above the wreckage, voices sing:
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.
But I say unto ye, That ye resist not evil.”
Margery Kempe. William Blake. Julian of Norwich. All those who see so much, feel so much, who speak when silence is safer. They seem to understand something difficult. That reacting against evil is not enough. That ethics alone is not enough. The nature of God is not reactive. It is wholeness. It is oneness. And it calls not for retaliation, but for alignment, a return to the grain of its virtue.
This is not the logic of power. It is not Newton’s equation, nor Rome’s law. It is something stranger.
Maybe this is what belief sometimes sounds like. Not the clear line of doctrine, but the fire beneath it. The roar, the weeping, the dissonance that refuses to resolve too quickly. Margery’s life wasn’t a hymn. It was a Credo. Broken, burning, and still, somehow, true.
To the reader who asked me about Blake, thank you. Your question stayed with me as I did the laundry, fixed a leaky pipe, and pulled weeds from the garden. It stayed with me while I made dinner. It led me back to Margery, whom I first stumbled across five years ago and never quite shook off. It nudged me to sit still and listen to Arvo Pärt, and it startled me when Credo began to play.
I’m no teacher in these things, just someone drawn to the same strange light that seems to be lighting up your path at the moment. I offer this response with respect and gratitude, from one fellow traveller to another.
Consilium 
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